Charles Kong Soo

Crim­i­nol­o­gist Dau­rius Figueira is warn­ing that T&T Mus­lims re­cruit­ed by ISIS could be used to in­fil­trate and desta­bilise west­ern coun­tries, in­clud­ing those in Eu­rope cop­ing with an in­flux of refugees.

Ex­act­ly one week af­ter ISIS re­leased a video fea­tur­ing four Trinidad-born fight­ers urg­ing T&T mus­lims to take up arms to fight in Syr­ia, the ter­ror­ist or­gan­i­sa­tion is claim­ing re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the Paris at­tacks that killed well over a hun­dred peo­ple, say­ing that the at­tacks were in re­tal­i­a­tion for France's bomb­ing in Syr­ia.

Speak­ing to the Sun­day Guardian Figueira said: "There is a pur­pose to the video. Why pro­duce a re­cruit­ment video on­ly for T&T, giv­en the com­par­a­tive­ly small size of the Mus­lim pop­u­la­tion here. It ac­counts for on­ly about five per cent of the pop­u­la­tion?

"The peo­ple be­hind the Al Raqqa re­cruit­ment video are now send­ing a mes­sage specif­i­cal­ly to Mus­lims in T&T that there is a T&T con­tin­gent of fight­ers now in ISIS, trained and led by na­tion­als of T&T.

"The Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty must in­ves­ti­gate that: The for­ma­tion of a T&T ISIS con­tin­gent, the mes­sage they want to send and why they want to re­cruit third world peo­ple whose first lan­guage is Eng­lish."

He said the on­ly oth­er pro­mo­tion­al re­lease to date in Eng­lish had British Is­lam­ic State fight­ers in it.

Figueira said Cari­com na­tion­als, Trinida­di­ans and peo­ple from the Com­mon­wealth who spoke Eng­lish and were ed­u­cat­ed can be used by ISIS to take the fight on the home soil of first-world coun­tries such as Britain and the US.

T&T and eight oth­er Caribbean coun­tries en­joy visa-free trav­el to Eu­rope.

He said the state agen­cies of the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment had failed to pen­e­trate and dis­man­tle these struc­tures and the IS video was in fact taunt­ing the state agen­cies of T&T on their fail­ure.

He said those fight­ers pre­sent­ed in the IS video will not re­turn to T&T ex­cept if they want­ed to es­cape IS for some rea­son.

Figueira said the ma­jor is­sue for T&T was re­cruit­ment here and the ex­port of po­ten­tial fight­ers to IS.

Ac­cord­ing to for­mer Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Gary Grif­fith, about 30 T&T na­tion­als made the trip to Syr­ia to fight for ISIS last year.

The Unit­ed Na­tions had al­so warned that T&T is one of a num­ber of coun­tries with Mus­lim pop­u­la­tions that is be­ing used as a re­cruit­ing ground for the ter­ror group.

Cy­ber hack­ers linked to the Is­lamist or­gan­i­sa­tion at­tacked the gov­ern­ment com­put­ers of Ja­maica and St Vin­cent and the Grenadines.

For­mer Ex­ec­u­tive Di­rec­tor of the Na­tion­al Op­er­a­tions Cen­tre (NOC) Garvin Heer­ah told the Sun­day Guardian that the de­tails that had sur­faced in the vi­ral videos were alarm­ing.

He said the video and in­for­ma­tion ob­tained through in­ter­net sur­veil­lance con­tin­ued to en­gage the at­ten­tion of na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty.

Heer­ah there is con­ti­nu­ity be­tween the last Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty ad­min­is­tra­tion, and the cur­rent one led by Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Ed­mund Dil­lon.

Heer­ah said the prob­a­bil­i­ty that that the ji­hadist re­cruits could re­turn to T&T should not be dis­missed, and all the arms of se­cu­ri­ty and law en­force­ment, here and abroad, must work to­geth­er.