Gail Alexan­der

Af­ter an ac­count by a Ger­man au­thor, now back from ex­am­in­ing the Is­lam­ic State of Iraq and Syr­ia (Isis) in Iraq and who en­coun­tered re­cruits from T&T in Mo­sul, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Gary Grif­fith has con­firmed there are 12 T&T na­tion­als who are with Isis, main­ly per­sons who were in­volved in crime and gang-re­lat­ed ac­tiv­i­ties in T&T.

Grif­fith was con­tact­ed yes­ter­day fol­low­ing break­ing re­ports from for­mer Ger­man politi­cian Juer­gen To­den­hoe­fer, who spent just over a week in the Isis-con­trolled city of Mo­sul, Iraq, and two oth­er sim­i­lar ar­eas in Syr­ia and Iraq. Grant­ed un­prece­dent­ed ac­cess, he spoke to Isis fight­ers and child sol­diers.To­den­hoe­fer, 74, who had ob­ject­ed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had ne­go­ti­at­ed for the vis­it with the rad­i­cal Is­lam­ic group for sev­en months but at the end he said he re­turned home pes­simistic.

He filed a re­port de­tail­ing is­sues he not­ed dur­ing his vis­it, in­clud­ing sex-slav­ery trau­ma, how ex­trem­ist groups raised mon­ey and oth­er mat­ters.He said Isis was stronger, more bru­tal and hard­er to con­front than he had ex­pect­ed and found Isis fol­low­ers high­ly mo­ti­vat­ed and sup­port­ive of the group's bru­tal­i­ty.He said he "met child fight­ers bear­ing arms" and en­coun­tered re­cruits from around the world, in­clud­ing US, UK, Swe­den and T&T." The num­bers in­clud­ed 14 Amer­i­cans.

To­den­hoe­fer said he was struck by their bru­tal zeal and the scale of their am­bi­tion to car­ry out "re­li­gious cleans­ing" and to ex­pand their ter­ri­to­ry.He is quot­ed as say­ing: "They are the most bru­tal and most dan­ger­ous en­e­my I have ever seen in my life... (it's) ter­ri­ble to feel peo­ple can be en­thu­si­as­tic about killing hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple."There's an en­thu­si­asm I have nev­er seen be­fore in war zones. They are so con­fi­dent, so sure of them­selves."

To­den­hoe­fer warned Isis was bent on re­li­gious cleans­ing."It's their of­fi­cial phi­los­o­phy. They are talk­ing about 500 mil­lion peo­ple have to die," he added.He said there was a con­stant stream of men com­ing to sign up to fight. He ex­plained: "When we stayed at their re­cruit­ment house there were 50 new fight­ers who came every day. I just could not be­lieve the glow in their eyes. They felt like they were com­ing to a promised land, like they were fight­ing for the right thing.

"At the be­gin­ning of this year few peo­ple knew of Isis but now they have con­quered an area the size of the UK. This is a one per cent move­ment with the pow­er of a nu­clear bomb or a tsuna­mi. "I had the im­pres­sion they want to show the Is­lam­ic State is work­ing. I don't see any­one who has a re­al chance to stop them. On­ly Arabs can stop Isis. I came back very pes­simistic."

T&T women be­ing used as de­coys

Con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Gary Grif­fith told the T&T Guardian apart from the 12 con­firmed cas­es of peo­ple leav­ing T&T to fight with Isis' 30,000-strong For­eign Ter­ror­ist Fight­ers (FTFs) com­ple­ment from over 80 coun­tries, Gov­ern­ment was mon­i­tor­ing T&T women who were go­ing and act­ing as sup­port for male T&T na­tion­als.

"Some are ac­com­pa­ny­ing the men to make it look like it's a fam­i­ly trav­el­ling nor­mal­ly to try to fool au­thor­i­ties that they are on le­git­i­mate trav­el pur­pos­es," he added.Grif­fith said in­tel­li­gence re­ports have con­firmed that the T&T na­tion­als who have gone to join Isis were large­ly those in­volved with rad­i­cal Is­lam­ic sects and who had been in­volved in crime lo­cal­ly.

He said se­cu­ri­ty agen­cies have al­so red flagged a num­ber of peo­ple of in­ter­est in T&T who were aid­ing and abet­ting T&T na­tion­als in go­ing to Iraq (via Syr­ia), by pro­vid­ing fi­nanc­ing and as­sist­ing with get­ting visas and trav­el doc­u­ments for them. The route is usu­al­ly through Eu­rope and Turkey.Grif­fith said: "The sit­u­a­tion means we can­not af­ford to heed, for in­stance, PNM protests and play pos­sum. Those days are gone."

Af­ter co-spon­sor­ing the UN counter-ter­ror­ism res­o­lu­tion in Sep­tem­ber, he said T&T was now ex­am­in­ing ways to pre­vent the re­turn to T&T of any FTFs. He said he was seek­ing meet­ings with the UK and US on that to pool in­for­ma­tion, since re­turn routes could take peo­ple through such coun­tries.He added: "If they want to be fool­ish enough to go there (Iraq), we don't want them to come back. Let them stay there."

"One thing I won't com­pro­mise on this is in­fil­tra­tion and the dif­fer­ence be­tween in­tel­li­gence and ev­i­dence on this could be a ter­ror­ist act in T&T so on this as­pect we will act on in­tel­li­gence and if this shows some­one is or was in­volved in ter­ror­ist ac­tiv­i­ty, we won't wait to ar­rest them."

Venezuela case on­go­ing

On the five T&T na­tion­als de­tained in Venezuela since March 19 on al­leged ter­ror­ist ac­tiv­i­ties, Grif­fith said he had spo­ken with at­tor­ney Nafeesa Mo­hammed and their fam­i­lies, who have in­sist­ed the men are not in­volved in the al­leged ac­tiv­i­ty.Grif­fith said he in­tend­ed to meet on the is­sue with the Venezue­lan am­bas­sador through the For­eign Af­fairs Min­istry but he stressed Gov­ern­ment could not force any sov­er­eign state's hand on such is­sues.

Al­so con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, Mo­hammed said she met Grif­fith two weeks ago on the is­sue. She said, how­ev­er, that the case was still at a pre­lim­i­nary stage and no date was set for hear­ing.

More in­fo

The T&T Guardian had re­ceived re­ports at mid-year that at least one of the Tri­nis who had gone to Syr­ia to fight last year was killed and the busi­ness­man's south­ern rel­a­tives had prayers for him.On the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the pass­ports or oth­er ID ma­te­r­i­al of such T&T na­tion­als could be used by Isis mem­bers to en­ter T&T, Grif­fith said it would be dif­fi­cult to ma­nip­u­late lo­cal pass­ports due to the elec­tron­ic sys­tems now in use.

Say­ing ter­ror­ists have shift­ed in re­cent years to "soft" tar­gets in­volv­ing less­er risk, such as the gen­er­al cit­i­zen­ry, Grif­fith said it was par­tic­u­lar­ly cru­cial to mon­i­tor cer­tain T&T groups, or­gan­i­sa­tions and fam­i­lies, as in­tel­li­gence agen­cies have been do­ing, to track their as­sis­tance to ter­ror­ists.He not­ed the re­cent at­tack on the Cana­di­an Par­lia­ment and that Aus­tralia re­cent­ly thwart­ed an Isis plot on its home turf al­so.

He said T&T would al­so re­ceive the ar­moured per­son­nel car­ri­ers, sim­i­lar to ones used to deal with the Cana­di­an Par­lia­ment at­tack, in the next month or two.