Undercover Jihadi: Inside the Toronto 18 - Al Qaeda Inspired, Homegrown Terrorism in the West
Description
Mubin Shaikh was born and raised in Toronto, Canada amidst twenty-first century, Western values. He attended public school. But at night, his parents insisted he also attend Islamic madrasa. Mubin joined the Canadian Army Cadets, used drugs, had sex and partied just like the other kids. He fit right in - until he didn't. Going through an acute identity crisis at age nineteen, Mubin recommitted himself to Islam. But a chance encounter with the Taliban in Pakistan and then exposure to Canadian extremists took him down the militant jihadi path. Mubin initially celebrated the 9-11 attacks, although he found the killing of innocent civilians in the name of Islam disturbing. 9-11 prompted him to travel again, to Syria-to become involved in the "great jihad"-the Muslim version of the final apocalypse in "the land of Sham and the Two Rivers." There he learned the truth of his religion and faced a fork in the road. Mubin went back in-but this time working undercover with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Ultimately joining the "Toronto 18", Mubin walked a tightrope between Western culture and Islamic jihad. Risking everything, he gathered inside information about the group's plans for catastrophic terror attacks-to detonate truck bombs around the city of Toronto, behead the Prime Minister, and storm the Parliament Building in retaliation for Western intervention in Muslim lands. Their cadres included Americans who had similar ideas for Washington, D.C. Mubin Shaikh is one of the very few people in the world to have actually been undercover in a homegrown terror cell. His is a story of growing up Muslim in an age where militant jihad is glorified, of being caught between two identities and finally emerging victorious.
Product Details
Price
$29.99
Publisher
Advances Press
Publish Date
October 17, 2014
Pages
300
Dimensions
6.0 X 9.0 X 0.81 inches | 1.31 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9781935866596
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About the Author
Anne Speckhard, Ph.D. is Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) and serves as Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine. She has interviewed over 800 terrorists, violent extremists, their family members and supporters in various parts of the world including in Western Europe, the Balkans, Central Asia, the Former Soviet Union and the Middle East. In the past five years, she has in-depth psychologically interviewed 273 ISIS defectors, returnees and prisoners as well as 16 al Shabaab cadres (and also interviewed their family members as well as ideologues) studying their trajectories into and out of terrorism, their experiences inside ISIS (and al Shabaab). She, with ICSVE, has also developed the Breaking the ISIS Brand Counter Narrative Project materials from these interviews which includes over 250 short counter narrative videos of terrorists denouncing their groups as un-Islamic, corrupt and brutal which have been used in over 200 Facebook and Instagram campaigns globally. Since 2020 she has also launched the ICSVE Escape Hate Counter Narrative Project interviewing over 50 white supremacists and members of hate groups developing counternarratives from their interviews as well. She has also interviewed 5 Antifa activists. Dr. Speckhard is active training key stakeholders in law enforcement, intelligence, educators, and other countering violent extremism professionals, both locally and internationally, on the psychology of terrorism, the use of counter-narrative messaging materials produced by ICSVE as well as studying the use of children as violent actors by groups such as ISIS. Dr. Speckhard has given consultations and police trainings to U.S., Canadian, German, UK, Dutch, Austrian, Swiss, Belgian, Danish, Iraqi, Syrian, Jordanian and Thai national police and security officials, among others, as well as trainings to elite hostage negotiation teams. She also consults to foreign governments on issues of terrorist prevention and interventions and repatriation, rehabilitation and reintegration of ISIS foreign fighters, wives and children. In 2007, she was responsible for designing the psychological and Islamic challenge aspects of the Detainee Rehabilitation Program in Iraq to be applied to 20,000 + detainees and 800 juveniles. She is a sought after counterterrorism expert and has consulted to NATO, OSCE, UN Women, UNCTED, UNODC, the EU Commission and EU Parliament, European and other foreign governments and to the U.S. Senate & House, Departments of State, Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, Health & Human Services, FBI and counterterrorism and security services as well as appeared appeared on CNN, BBC, NPR, Fox News, MSNBC, CTV, CBC and in Time, Newsweek, Daily Beast, The New York Times, The Washington Post, London Times and many other publications. ICSVE's research has been funded by the EU Commission, U.S. Departments of State, Homeland Security, Defense and Justice, UN Women, and the Embassy of Qatar to name a few. Dr. Speckhard regularly writes a column for Homeland Security Today and speaks and publishes on the topics of the psychology of radicalization and terrorism and is the author of several books, including Homegrown Hate, Talking to Terrorists, Bride of ISIS, Undercover Jihadi and ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of the Terrorist Caliphate. Her research has also been published in Global Security: Health, Science and Policy, Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, Journal of African Security, Journal of Strategic Security, the Journal of Human Security, Bidhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies, Journal for Deradicalization, Perspectives on Terrorism and the International Studies Journal. Her academic publications are found here: https: //georgetown.academia.edu/AnneSpeckhardWebsite: and on the ICSVE website http: //www.icsve.org Follow @AnneSpeckhard
Jessica Stern is a leading expert on terrorism and trauma. Stern is the coauthor with J. M. Berger of ISIS: The State of Terror and the author of Denial: A Memoir of Terror and Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, selected by the New York Times as a notable book of the year. She has held fellowships awarded by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Erikson Institute, and the MacArthur Foundation. She was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, a national fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and a fellow of the World Economic Forum. Stern is a research professor at Boston University. Prior to teaching, she worked in government, serving on President Clinton's National Security Council Staff and as an analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
