Anne Aly (Cowan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

First of all I would like to acknowledge the success of the military action by the Iraqi Army and coalition forces, including Australia, in gaining critical territory from Daesh in Iraq. At the same time, however, I caution that we need to heed the lessons from previous conflicts against terrorist actors in the region. Almost a decade after the terrorist attacks on the United States, the prolonged war on terror has failed to actually eradicate the threat of international terrorism. While this hard power approach of war on terror succeeded in decimating the operational and tactical capacity of al-Qaeda central, the belief that the destruction of training camps would successfully eradicate al-Qaeda's affiliates and its ideology was indeed misplaced. This wisdom of employing an orthodox military response against an unorthodox enemy has rightly been questioned. The war on terror has not weakened the ability of terrorist groups to inspire, recruit or mobilise.

The last speaker, the member for Canning, spoke of the need to understand the world view of Daesh or ISIL. I reiterate what he said, but I would also say that last year Major General Michael Nagata, the most senior general in charge of coalition forces in Iraq, threw his hands up in the air and stated: 'The problem is we do not understand Daesh. We do not understand their ideology. We do not understand what they want.' I would argue that actually we do. There has been much analysis and research on exactly what their ideology is, on exactly what their world view is and on exactly what their strategic motives are and what mobilises them. What we do not understand is exactly how that speaks to and influences young people, particularly those in the West.

I am reminded here of the words of Ban Ki-moon, the outgoing UN Secretary-General, who at the White House CVE summit last year stated, 'Missiles will kill terrorists but they will not kill terrorism.' That is why we need to be vigilant and steel ourselves against the urge to find simplistic explanations and answers that do not need take into account the complexity of radicalisation and violent extremism such as terrorism and that, importantly, hold no hope of offering solutions that are viable or effective.

The lack of empirical data to support many of the myths and assumptions that have been put forward not only to explain terrorism but also to develop frameworks to address it is an ongoing issue of concern. As an academic, I sought to answer questions about why people become terrorist actors and what we can do to prevent it. For me as an academic, access to data was a major barrier, and that is because it is very difficult if not impossible to interview terrorist actors—especially if they are suicide bombers—to engage them and to gain those valuable insights into their psychologies and their histories. So, in the absence of robust data and research, we tend to fall into the pattern of making assumptions based on myth and conjecture and single-line statements based on crumbs of information that are gleaned from media reports.

There are two things with regard to the particular motion. The first is that, based on past evidence, it is much more likely that the mujahedin, as they call themselves, will follow conflicts to the next theatre of jihad, as have those who fought before in Afghanistan and then in Iraq and Syria. That is, of course, if they survive and manage to escape from Daesh, who are known for executing those who try to desert the organisation. Secondly, the one study that has been done on this has been done by a man named Thomas Hegghammer. According to Thomas Hegghammer's data, which was also very limited, most foreign fighters do not leave the theatre of combat with the intention of returning for domestic attacks. In fact, around one in nine foreign fighters return to perpetrate attacks in the West. Nevertheless, it is prudent to be aware and ready to respond to any threat posed by those who are returning, for today's terrorism is characterised by the ability of small numbers to cause large-scale mass-casualty attacks, as the events in Paris have shown us.

Daesh is but one iteration of a global violent jihadist movement that is likely to continue even after the last operative is gone from Syria and Iraq. This is not the fight of my generation but the fight of generations to come, and we need to keep paying attention to it.

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