Commentary: Keeping our guard up against extremist groups ‘weaponising’ our youth

SINGAPORE: The details of a young Singaporean’s foiled terror plot are chilling in their apparent simplicity. Using scissors or a knife, the 17-year-old had planned to attack targets near Tampines West Community Centre, “within walking distance from his home”, during the September school holidays.

The news that he had been arrested and detained under the Internal Security Act was released on Oct 18. Described as a staunch Islamic State supporter, he had planned to travel to Syria to engage in armed violence, but later opted for the Singapore attack plan as he had deemed it easier to execute.

Youth radicalisation remains a concerning trend. In Singapore, 13 of the 52 self-radicalised individuals dealt with under internal security laws since 2015 are youths aged 20 or younger, according to the Internal Security Department (ISD) Singapore Terrorism Threat Assessment Report 2024 in July.

Three teenagers were arrested in connection with a failed attack, allegedly Islamic State-inspired, on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, Austria in August.

Three months earlier, a 21-year-old man attacked a police station in Ulu Tiram in southern Malaysia, killing two and injuring one officer. He had been radicalised in his teenage years by his father, who had reportedly propagated Islamic State teachings among his family from 2014 to 2024.  

Terrorism researchers JM Berger and Jessica Stern in their 2015 publication ISIS: The State Of Terror asserted that Islamic State “actively recruits children” to engage in “combat, including suicide missions”. US officials have likewise warned that Al-Qaeda has tried to radicalise youth for attacks in the West.

The alarming reality is that youth are targets of terrorist recruitment. And ideology, psychology and opportunity come together in a way that can be described as “weaponising" our youth.

PSYCHOLOGICALLY VULNERABLE TO IDEOLOGY

Youths are particularly susceptible to extremist ideology - there is ample social science research that shows this.

The executive reasoning centres of teenage brains develop more slowly than the emotional centres, leading teenagers to seek unrealistic black-and-white answers to complex issues. Little wonder therefore that ISD’s 2023 report observed that the “structured and dichotomous” extremist worldview appears as “more appealing to the young”. 

Youths with difficult family situations may also possess a fragile sense of self and tend to seek external validation to boost their self-esteem. 

Male youths may develop toxic notions of masculinity - including the idea that it is especially “masculine” to engage in violence in supposed defence of some grand cause - especially if they lack appropriate older male role models in their immediate family.

It is worth noting that not all youths are equally susceptible to radicalising pressures. Several of the recent young ISD detainees were reported to have tried to radicalise their friends but were unsuccessful.

That said, extremist groups have long been adept at using the internet and social media to sell their message. Their “us-versus-them” narrative offers simplistic solutions and an identity bigger than that of the youths themselves.

In this most recent case of the 17-year-old, the radicalisation process started in August 2023 when he surfed the internet for religious knowledge and came across foreign preachers spouting segregationist ideas - that Muslims should not mingle with non-Muslims, extend festive greetings to them or participate in non-Muslim festivals.

It took mere months. By January 2024, the youth had become a staunch Islamic State supporter and soon took the step of swearing a bai’ah (oath of allegiance). This means that at that point, he considered himself a soldier of the so-called caliphate, willing to do anything and even die for the cause, either in Singapore or overseas.

LOWER BAR FOR ATTACKS

Another key factor enabling violent youth radicalisation is the relative simplicity of mounting a lone-actor attack.

In 2001, the Al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) terror network had planned to mount suicide bombings, against specific Western diplomatic and commercial, as well as Singapore government targets. Before they were thwarted, the Singapore JI cells had to acquire bombmaking expertise and equipment, conducted surveillance and spent years planning simultaneous coordinated bombing attacks.

Things are now different. Islamic State propaganda for years has called for the use of easy-to-weaponise everyday items like vehicles and knives to carry out lone-actor attacks against non-Muslims “wherever they are”.

This much lower skillset has created more opportunities for self-radicalised and self-proclaimed “soldiers of the Caliphate” to mount attacks - just as the 17-year-old planned to use household items to stab his targets in the HDB heartlands.

HOW TO PROTECT YOUTHS AND SOCIETY

Such self-radicalisation and low-tech lone-actor terrorist acts are harder to detect, compared to the large-scale complicated bomb plots of yesteryear. What then can be done?

The first challenge is very much in understanding and detecting the warning signs of youth self-radicalisation. Family members, friends, teachers and community leaders have a part to play.

Second, effective laws can help. In Singapore, the Online Safety (Miscellaneous Amendments) Act and Online Criminal Harms Act empower the authorities to block access to violent extremist sites online. However, it is technically impossible to block all extremist content online, as new sites and accounts can readily be created.  

In addition, while it is easier to remove extremist content from public-facing platforms such as Facebook, X or Instagram, it is much harder to track and remove from private, end-to-end encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram, Signal and WhatsApp.

Third, the real challenge therefore is to develop the emotional and intellectual resilience of youths against violent extremist ideology. In Singapore, ISD and its partners, like the Ministry of Education and the Religious Rehabilitation Group - comprising independent moderate Islamic scholars - reach out regularly to schools and institutions of higher learning to train youths to better detect harmful social media content and to “be more discerning of information they get from different sources, including online”. 

Moreover, through co-curricular and various school-level experiences, youths from diverse backgrounds are given opportunities to interact with one another, in the process fostering “social bonds” that can help “counter the impact of exclusivist or extremist ideologies”. Greater digital literacy and strong social bonds amongst our youths are certainly needed in the wake of the Oct 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel that has energised violent and divisive extremist propaganda online.

It may take a village to not merely raise a child, but to also protect them from the dangers of violent radicalisation in this digital age.

Kumar Ramakrishna is Professor of National Security Studies, Provost’s Chair in National Security Studies and Dean of the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.