SUMMARY: The deadly Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka have refocused attention on the Islamic State, which claims connection to the eight believed suicide bombers. Judy Woodruff talks to Rukmini Callimachi of The New York Times about indicators of the terror group’s influence on the Sri Lanka attacks and how ISIS maintains robust media presence and recruiting levels.
SUMMARY: In the African Sahel, located between the Sahara Desert and the equator, the climate has long been inhospitable. But now rising temperatures have caused prolonged drought and unpredictable weather patterns, exacerbating food shortages, prompting migration and contributing to instability in countries already beset by crisis. Special correspondent Mike Cerre reports from Niger.
SUMMARY: Ali Soufan, a former FBI counterterrorism agent who identified the 9/11 hijackers, felt both joy and worry the night Osama bin Laden was killed. He worried that the U.S. didn't have a strategy to combat bin Laden's message, which lived on even though the Al-Qaeda leader was dead. The evolution of terrorism is the subject of his new book, "The Anatomy of Terror.” Soufan joins Margaret Warner.
MARGARET WARNER (NewsHour): You, in almost a novelistic way, look at bin Laden or al-Zarqawi, who was the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq; or Baghdadi, the head of ISIS.
ALI SOUFAN: Ya.
MARGARET WARNER: Was there a common thread among them?
ALI SOUFAN, Author, “The Anatomy of Terror: Well, ya, absolutely. And the common thread is their own belief.
It is people who believe that there is an ongoing war between the West and the United States. And anyone who does not in their way of interpreting events around the world is an infidel, regardless if you're a Muslim or you're not a Muslim. That doesn't matter.
And that's why almost 95 percent of the victims of this form of terrorism are Muslims.
A coordinated double attack in Iran on Wednesday left 12 people dead and wounded dozens, according to state media. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility on its website. If true, it would be the first major attack by the terrorist group in Iran.
Attackers armed with pistols and assault rifles stormed the Iranian parliament building in the capital Tehran Wednesday morning as people scrambled to escape, some through windows. A session of parliament was in progress at the time. Lawmakers took cover in the locked chamber during the siege.
The same morning, more assailants struck the mausoleum for Islamic Republic founder Ayatollah Khomeini in southern Tehran. At least one attacker detonated a suicide vest, according to state broadcaster Irib. Khomeini led the 1979 Islamic revolution that removed the Western-backed shah and was the country's first supreme leader.
The sieges ended with four of the attackers dead. Later in the day, Iran's ISNA news agency reported that police in Tehran arrested five suspects, according to Reuters.
Iran is fighting Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq. The last major attack in Iran, which is majority Shiite, was in 2010 when Sunni extremists bombed a mosque in the Sistan-Baluchestan province.
The militant group's Aamaq news agency released a video purporting to show the inside of the parliament with a body lying on the floor. A voice says in Arabic, “Do you think we will leave? We will remain, God willing.”
President Donald Trump offered the following statement: “We grieve and pray for the innocent victims of the terrorist attacks in Iran, and for the Iranian people, who are going through such challenging times. We underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin offered his condolences and said Russia “resolutely condemns” the violence. He pledged to continue fighting international terrorism.
SUMMARY: Gunmen stormed Iran's parliament building Wednesday morning, igniting a siege that lasted for hours, killing 13. Meanwhile, the shrine of the Ayatollah Khomeini was also attacked. Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner reports, and William Brangham speaks with Randa Slim of the Middle East Institute and Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Stephen Miller, a senior White House policy adviser, claimed that 72 people from the seven countries covered by President Donald Trump's 90-day travel ban “have been implicated in terroristic activity in the United States” since the 9/11 attacks. That's a gross exaggeration.
Miller cited an analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies that covered alleged terror cases from Sept. 12, 2001, through Dec. 31, 2014. We reviewed the convictions of all 72 people included on the list, and here is what we found:
None of the 72 people was responsible for any terrorist-related deaths in the U.S. — even though roughly 1 million citizens of the seven countries came to the U.S. during this time as refugees, immigrants or on nonimmigrant visas, according to our review of State Department data.
- Most — 44 of the 72 people — were not convicted on terrorism charges. Many were swept up in terrorism investigations, but investigators failed to provide evidence of terrorism-related crimes. Prosecutors instead filed fraud, immigration and other lesser charges. One of the 44 had his conviction overturned on appeal.
- More than a third — 28 of the 72 — were convicted of terrorism crimes or pleaded guilty to terrorism-related activity. The vast majority of these people were convicted of helping to finance terrorism outside the U.S. Only three of the 28 were convicted of plotting acts of terrorism on soil, and two of them were sting operations.
- Four of the 72 were arrested in foreign countries and extradited to the United States for prosecution. Three of the four were convicted on terrorism charges. None of the four would have been blocked by Trump's travel ban, since they were not attempting to enter the U.S. In fact, three of the four, including a Dutch citizen, were arrested in countries (Spain, Romania and the Netherlands) that were not covered by the travel ban.
Defending Trump's Travel Ban
Miller appeared on several Sunday talk shows on Feb. 12 and discussed, among other things, the president's executive order — Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. The order imposes a 90-day travel ban on the citizens of seven predominately Muslim countries (Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen). It also indefinitely prohibits Syrian refugees from entering the U.S., and suspends the refugee program for citizens of all other countries for 120 days.
U.S. District Judge James L. Robart on Feb. 3 issued a temporary restraining order that blocked portions of Trump's order from taking effect, pending his full consideration of a lawsuit filed by the states of Washington and Minnesota seeking to permanently block Trump's order. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Feb. 9 unanimously denied the Trump administration's emergency motion to lift Robart's temporary order.
“The Government has pointed to no evidence that any alien from any of the countries named in the Order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States,” the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said.
As a result of the court decisions, refugees approved for resettlement in the U.S. and visa holders of the seven countries can travel to the U.S., pending further action by the administration or the courts.
In defense of the temporary travel ban, top White House officials have cited terrorism attacks that never happened. Kellyanne Conway, the counselor to the president, spoke of the “Bowling Green massacre” and White House spokesman Sean Spicer repeatedly listed “Atlanta” among the sites of U.S. terror attacks. (We did not write about those incidents, because both acknowledged their mistakes. We try not to play gotcha here at FactCheck.org.)
On NBC's “Meet the Press,” Miller also defended the president's travel ban, and criticized the court decisions. Host Chuck Todd asked Miller why the administration's travel ban does not include citizens from countries that have a history of committing terrorism in the U.S., such as Saudi Arabia.
Miller, Feb. 12: First of all, 72 individuals according to the Center for Immigration Studies have been implicated in terroristic activity in the United States who hail from those seven nations.
Miller made a similar statement on ABC's “This Week” that same day.
Miller, Feb. 12: We know there's at least several dozen, perhaps many more than that, cases of terrorism from these countries that have happened in the United States in terms of terroristic plots, terroristic activity, material support for terrorism, supporting terrorism overseas — all different kinds of terroristic activity that's been interdicted in the United States tracing back to these seven countries.
The Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy group for low immigration, posted a blog item on Feb. 11 that said “72 individuals from the seven countries covered in President Trump's vetting executive order have been convicted in terror cases since the 9/11 attacks.” CIS extracted the 72 names from a larger list of foreign-born suspected terrorists compiled by the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on immigration.
We reviewed the CIS list and found that not all 72 individuals from the seven countries covered by Trump's travel ban were convicted of terrorism charges.
44 Convictions — None for Terrorism
Most of the 72 individuals referenced by Miller were not convicted on terrorism charges. Many of them were caught up in terrorism investigations in the days following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but were either never charged or not convicted of terrorism.
For example, CIS listed 19 Iraqis convicted in terror cases. But we found that only three Iraqis were convicted on terrorism charges. Most — 11 of the 19 — were part of a terrorism investigation in Pittsburgh that ended up as a simple fraud case that had nothing to do with terrorism.
In the Pittsburgh case, Kamel Albred, Haider Alshomary, Haider Al-Tamimi, Ali Alubeidy, Alawi Al-Baraa, Mustafa Al-Aboody, Mohammed Alibrahimi (a cousin of Ali Alubeidy), Fadhil Al-Khaledy, Hatef Al-Atabi, Wathek Al-Atabi and Elmeliani Benmoumen were among 20 people arrested in the days following the 9/11 attacks on charges they illegally obtained commercial driver's licenses and hazmat transportation permits, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Federal prosecutors feared that the men obtained the licenses in order to transport hazardous materials across the country to carry out terrorist attacks, the Post-Gazette wrote.
But the terrorism investigation fizzled.
When one of the defendants, Alawi Al-Baraa, pleaded guilty to illegally obtaining a hazmat license by bribing a state official, the Post-Gazette wrote, U.S. District Judge Robert Cindrich “took the unusual step” at the hearing of asking the federal prosecutor to make clear that Al-Baraa's case had nothing to do with terrorism.
Post-Gazette, Dec. 14, 2001: “We have attempted through the FBI's efforts to establish any possible connections between Mr. Al-Baraa's activities and the events of Sept. 11,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Bruce Teitelbaum. “We have been unable to establish any link.”
Teitelbaum said there is no reason to believe Al-Baraa is anything but a truck driver who paid bribe money to get a new hazmat certification without taking the required test.
Nearly four years later, the Washington Post wrote a story about the Pittsburgh case — “The Terrorism Case That Wasn't — and Still Is” — that quoted Cindrich as saying that he would “not continue to characterize this as a successful prosecution of a terrorism case, because it was not.”
Similarly, CIS identified 19 Yemeni citizens on its list of 72 individuals “convicted in terror cases,” but we found only four who were convicted on terrorism charges. Most of them — 10 — were initially suspected of funneling money to terrorists through illegal money transfers, but the investigations failed to support terrorism charges.
For example, federal authorities grew suspicious of a check-cashing business in California and set up a sting operation that resulted in the March 2007 arrests of three Yemen-born men, Yehia Ali Ahmed Alomari, Mohamed Al Huraibi and Saleh Mohamed Taher Saeed. The men agreed to arrange illegal overseas transfers of more than $100,000 for an undercover agent who allegedly “told the men that some of the money would go to Hezbollah, an organization linked to terrorism,” according to the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.
However, the paper wrote, “U.S. District Judge Charles Siragusa did not allow mention of Hezbollah during the trial because the criminal charges the men faced had no connection to terrorism.” Ultimately, the three each pleaded guilty to operating an illegal money-transmitting business — an outcome “authorities contended” was “fair, given the government's evidence,” the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle wrote. The paper said that one of the jurors told the men, “I hope you go and have a good life.”
Like the Pittsburgh case we mentioned earlier, several of the terrorist investigations were launched in the days following the 9/11 attacks but terrorism charges failed to materialize:
- Mustafa Kilfat and his father were stopped while driving in New Jersey because they were “driving a red Pontiac — a car law enforcement officials briefly believed was connected to the attacks” on Sept. 11, 2001, according to the New York Daily News. The two men had no connection to the 9/11 attacks, but Kilfat — a Syrian citizen — was convicted on one count of visa fraud.
- Nageeb Abdul Jabar Mohamed Al-Hadi was arrested in Toronto in the hours immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He was bound for Chicago using a false name, carrying three Yemeni passports and two Lufthansa uniforms, according to the Chicago Tribune. “A prosecutor in the case said Al-Hadi provided the false information because he didn't think he would be allowed to re-enter the United States, after abandoning the legal status that he had obtained here in the 1980s through a sham marriage,” the paper wrote. Al-Hadi was convicted on one count of visa fraud.
- Mohamed Abdi, a Somalian living in Virginia, was arrested in the days soon after the 9/11 attacks because authorities found his name and phone number written on a Washington street map inside a 1988 Toyota registered to Nawaf al Hazmi, one of the 9/11 hijackers who crashed into the Pentagon, according to CNN and the Chicago Tribune. But, as the Washington Post later reported, “authorities were unable to find any connection to terrorism.” Abdi pleaded guilty to forging rental subsidy checks.
- Mohammed Refai became a suspect shortly after the 9/11 attacks when “federal investigators in Arkansas found documents that appeared to connect one of the terrorist hijackers, Saeed Alghamdi, with an apartment complex in Akron, Ohio,” the New York Times wrote. Refai lived in the complex. “According to newspaper accounts, investigators apparently have decided that the documents from Arkansas involved a case of mistaken identity,” the Times wrote.
Other examples of terror investigations that did not result in terrorism convictions, but were among the 72 cited by Miller:
- Mohamed Hussein, a Somalian businessman living in Massachusetts, was “suspected of diverting money to the al-Qaeda network,” according to the Agence France Presse, but was convicted on two counts of illegal money transfers. Prosecutors presented no evidence linking Hussein to terrorists. U.S. District Judge Robert E. Keeton sentenced Hussein to 18 months, rather than the five years sought by prosecutors. “You're trying to ask me to sentence him as a terrorist,” Keeton told a prosecutor. “It shocks my conscience that I would even be asked to do that.” (Note: Hussein's name was misspelled on the CIS list as “Mohammed Husssein.”)
- Pirouz Sedaghaty, who goes by the name of Pete Seda, was convicted in 2010 of two felonies related to his charity, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation. Federal prosecutors accused Seda of using his organization “to send nearly $150,000 to support religious extremist militants in Chechnya,” according to the Justice Department. But he faced no terrorism charges and his conviction was overturned on appeal by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. “This is a tax fraud case that was transformed into a trial on terrorism,” Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown wrote in the court opinion.
Terrorism Convictions and Pleas
Of course, some citizens of the seven countries covered by Trump's ban were convicted on terrorism charges. In all, there were 28 individuals who were either convicted on terrorism charges (25) or admitted to terrorism activity (three) in pleading guilty to lesser charges.
Of those 28, however, three arrests occurred abroad, and the suspects were extradited to the United States. None of them were trying to enter the U.S., so they would not have been blocked by Trump's travel ban. Like Osama bin Laden, they were plotting attacks from other countries.
For example, Syrian arms dealer Monzer Al Kassar was extradited from Spain and later convicted on charges of conspiring to sell millions of dollars worth of high-powered weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to be used to kill Americans in Colombia, according to the New York Times.
Al Kassar was convicted of, among other things, providing material support to terrorists. That was true for most of the terrorism convictions, and many of them were Somalian citizens living in the U.S. In all, there were 14 Somalians convicted of helping to finance terrorism abroad, typically for al-Shabaab — a terrorist group operating in East Africa whose leaders are affiliated with al Qaeda, according to the National Counterterrorism Center.
There were only three cases during this time in which foreign-born residents of the seven countries on Trump's temporary travel ban attempted to carry out a terrorist attack in the U.S. — two of which were not real attacks, but rather government sting operations:
- Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Somalia who lived in Oregon, was charged in an undercover sting operation with attempting to set off a fake bomb supplied by undercover FBI agents at a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland. He was sentenced in October 2014 to 30 years in prison.
- Yassin Aref, a Kurdish refugee from Iraq, was convicted in a counterterrorism sting operation in 2006. According to the New York Times and the Albany Times Union, an undercover federal agent told Mohammed M. Hossain, Aref's co-defendant, that he planned to assassinate the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. in New York City and then sell the weapon for $50,000. The undercover agent offered to give Hossain a $50,000 loan for improvements to his pizza shop. “According to testimony, Mr. Hossain asked Mr. Aref to attend another meeting with the informant to act, by Muslim custom, as a witness to the loan,” the New York Times wrote.
- Mansour J. Arbabsiar, an Iranian American living in Texas, was convicted on charges of “plotting to hire assassins from a Mexican drug cartel to murder Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States,” according to the New York Times. He pleaded guilty to “conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries and two counts related to murder-for-hire,” the Times said.
To sum up, we found 28, or more than a third, of the 72 people cited by Miller were convicted on terrorism charges. We found that 25 of the 28 people were in the U.S., when they were arrested. Only three of 25 were implicated in plotting a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and only one of those was aimed at U.S. citizens on U.S. soil — a government sting operation, not an actual attack.
None of the U.S. residents from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen were responsible for any attacks on U.S. soil that resulted in a loss of life. At the same time, roughly 956,000 citizens of those countries entered the U.S. as refugees and visa holders, according to State Department data.
A total of 258,508 refugees from the seven countries resettled in the U.S. from Sept. 12, 2001, to Dec. 31, 2014. Another 697,113 others obtained immigration and nonimmigration visas in fiscal years 2002 through 2014, which covers Oct. 1, 2001, to Sept. 30, 2014.
Here is the breakdown, by country:
COUNTRY REFUGEES VISA HOLDERS TERRORISM CONVICTIONS/PLEAS Somalia 82,365 10,691 16 Yemen 113 60,938 4 Iraq 118,994 110,864 4 Syria 497 123,876 2 Iran 38,518 305,883 2 Libya 8 36,692 0 Sudan 18,013 48,169 0 TOTALS 258,508 697,113 28
SUMMARY: As a young man, Lawrence Wright first visited the Middle East when he taught English in Cairo. He has spent much of his life since reporting on the region -- documenting culture by sharing the stories of individuals. His new book, “The Terror Years,” considers the evolution of extremism and the Islamic State since 9/11. Wright sits down with Jeffrey Brown to discuss.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Lawrence Wright first went to the Middle East as a young man to teach English in Cairo. It was the beginning of a long relationship with the region that would coincide with the rise of terrorism and American wars that continue to this day.
His 2006 book, “The Looming Tower,” on the growth of al-Qaida and events leading to 9/11, won the Pulitzer Prize. Now he's pulled together writings from “The New Yorker” magazine, the product of many years of reporting, in a new book titled “The Terror Years: From Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State.”
And, Larry Wright, welcome back to you.
LAWRENCE WRIGHT, Author, “The Terror Years”: Thank you, Jeff. It's good to be with you.
JEFFREY BROWN: Fifteen years after 9/11, I suppose there is a sense of wanting to tie things together. Did you see a guiding thread in your work when you went back to look at it?
LAWRENCE WRIGHT: Yes.
I was planning just to put together a collection of articles, but then when I looked at all the work that I had done on terrorism since 9/11, I never thought that I would still be writing about that 15 years later.
But I realized these pieces told — had a kind of narrative quality in terms of the evolution of ISIS and al-Qaida and how it's developed from 9/11 until today.
SUMMARY: Take a look at the room 9/11 built: The operations center at the National Counterterrorism Center aggregates data in hopes that analysts will be able to predict the next terrorist attack. With the advent of “social media intelligence,” answers are everywhere, but the challenge is piecing them together. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports.
MILES O'BRIEN (NewsHour): This is the room 9/11 built, the operations center at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) just outside Washington, D.C.
NICK RASMUSSEN, National Counterterrorism Center: On a 24/7 basis, we have officers here working in shifts who are consuming, reading, analyzing, and assessing every bit of available information that there is to try to figure out what terrorist threats are aimed at the United States.
MILES O'BRIEN: Nick Rasmussen is the director here. The agency itself, and this room in particular, were created to encourage the myriad of intelligence, military and law enforcement organizations involved in national security to share classified information.
This is where they try to connect the dots.
NICK RASMUSSEN: So, there are probably officers at NCTC from 17 or 18 different government organizations all across the government. Basically, every three- or four-letter agency that you could probably name, we probably have somebody here at NCTC serving from that organization on a one- or two- or three-year assignment.
MILES O'BRIEN: The nature of the work here has changed dramatically in recent years.
MAN: These folks can get radicalized by one group and the baton can be passed to another group.
WOMAN: The FBI had this man on its radar as early as 2013.
MILES O'BRIEN: More lone wolves, fewer face-to-face meetings and phone calls, the Internet as a source of inspiration and planning.
MAN: Self-radicalization doesn't have to take many months or many years.
NICK RASMUSSEN: Increasingly, what connecting the dots means to me is dealing with the huge, huge volume of publicly available or open source or unclassified information that's out there that may have terrorism relevance.
And the work we're doing now with our partners in the intelligence community often doesn't involve really, really sensitive intelligence. It involves looking at Twitter or looking at some other social media platform and trying to figure out who that individual behind that screen name, behind that handle might actually be and whether that person poses a threat to the United States.
SUMMARY: How do you deter people from being seduced by messages of extremism on social media? Science correspondent Miles O’Brien looks at some of the strategies, including videos that provide a counter-narrative to the Islamic State and a computer program that uses digital signatures to track the movement of images on the internet.
SUMMARY: As we approach the 15th anniversary of 9/11, we ponder the question: Is America safer now from terrorism than it was on that fateful day? Steven Brill spent the last year evaluating what has changed, including tightened airline security policies, but also how the country returned to "politics as usual." He speaks with Judy Woodruff about his findings -- and his recommendations.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): And now a look at the current state of security inside the U.S.
As we approach the 15th anniversary of 9/11, journalist Steven Brill spent the past year looking into how the country has changed since that terrible day, what's been spent and what gaps still exist. His article, “Are We Any Safer?”, appears in the latest issue of “The Atlantic.”
And I recently sat down with him and asked him what he learned.
STEVEN BRILL, Contributor, The Atlantic: In a nutshell, what I concluded was, the way we have responded to the terrorist attacks, to 9/11, which, you know, changed everything, is sort of a microcosm of what we are as a country today.
A lot of it was heroic, ingenious, people going beyond the cause of duty, doing really great things. And then a lot of it was actually quite the opposite, a lot of Beltway boondoggles, billions of dollars wasted because government contractors promised technology and solutions that they couldn't produce.
And we have struggled as a country with dealing with the notion of this new kind of risk. The idea, as President Bush explained, after 9/11, of never again, we're never going to have a terrorist attack again, that's just unrealistic in today's world.
JUDY WOODRUFF: You clearly give the government — and it spans several administrations, two administrations — credit for getting some things right, as you just said, but…
STEVEN BRILL: A lot of things right, and a lot of unsung people, tens of thousands of people going to work every day at the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, places like TSA, the Border Patrol, really obsessed with the job of keeping us safe.
And the only time we notice them is when something goes wrong. And that makes it a tough job. On the other hand, a lot of it went back to politics as usual. Every small town that you can think of made a request for government grants for homeland security, for everything ranging from routine fire trucks to fish tanks in a police station.
So, there are a lot of abuses.
JUDY WOODRUFF: I was struck because, early on in the piece, you say, yes, we are safer than we were on 9/11, safer against the kind of threat we faced on 9/11.
STEVEN BRILL: Right.
JUDY WOODRUFF: But the threat has changed.
STEVEN BRILL: Right.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And that's what the government is — all of us are grappling with right now.
STEVEN BRILL: We have done a lot to batten down the hatches, to make us safer, at the airports, at the ports, all over the place.
But the threats have multiplied, the threats around the world. Our defenses are much stronger. The offense has multiplied and is much stronger. And it's more difficult because, unlike the kind of coordinated, orchestrated attack that we faced on 9/11, where people were communicating, money was exchanging hands, that kind of stuff which we can now track, if some lone wolf in his basement is online…
-----
JUDY WOODRUFF: What would you say to the next leader of this country, the next president about what most needs to be done to make this country…
(CROSSTALK)
STEVEN BRILL: Well, the first thing that needs not to be done is to declare war on Muslims or Islam, because that’s exactly what those terrorists want.
They want this to be the apocalyptic, end-of-all-worlds war between them and us. And President Bush didn’t take the bait, and President Obama has resisted taking that bait.
Donald Trump campaigns on that. And it almost makes you think — in fact, it makes me think that ISIS would love to have someone like Trump be President, because they would get the fulfillment of their dream, which is to have the great confrontation with Western civilization.
The second thing is to keep educating the country. While doing everything we can to prevent terrorism, keep educating the country to the reality that there are going to be some attacks, and that doesn’t mean it’s the apocalypse. It doesn’t mean we’re weak.
Saying there are going to be attacks doesn’t mean you’re throwing in the towel, but it means we have to be realistic.
SUMMARY: Their faces are flooding the internet: the thousands of child soldiers fighting in Syria. Whether they join armed groups out of economic need or a sense of cultural obligation, these children become instruments of violence and propaganda, often witnessing--and executing--acts of sheer inhumanity. For those able to escape, like 15-year-old Ibrahim, the trauma proves difficult to overcome.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): For centuries, children have been used as weapons of war. Today's conflict in Syria is no exception.
ISIS has recruited and exploited children in Syria and Iraq, using them as soldiers, informants and even executioners.
NewsHour special correspondent Marcia Biggs brings us a profile of one former ISIS child solder, and his deep emotional scars.
And a warning: This report contains material that may be disturbing to some viewers.
MARCIA BIGGS (NewsHour): The images are all over the Internet, children growing up in the ranks of armed groups in the war in Syria. This child in an ISIS propaganda video beheads a Syrian regime soldier. These children execute captured soldiers in the ancient city of Palmyra.
According to a study published by Georgia State University, it's a phenomenon that's playing out on all sides of the conflict, with almost 1,000 children in the last three years showing up in online eulogies, calling kids martyrs, having died for the cause.
And those are only the ones whose videos made it to the Internet.
Riyad Al-Najem represents one of only a handful of small local organizations trying to combat this problem inside Syria, visiting families one by one.
RIYAD AL-NAJEM, Executive Manager, Hurras Network: In some areas, the main reason of child recruitment is poverty. Parents can't find food for their children, so they push them into armed groups to get money and food. In other areas, it's about culture. Parents consider that their children have become men, and they should carry weapons, that it's not acceptable for a child of his cousin holding a weapon and he's not.
MARCIA BIGGS: In Idlib province, activists from the group Children Not Soldiers hang signs and spray-paint graffiti to create awareness.
The U.N. has a campaign of the same name, but has not yet been able to gain a foothold here. Fighting recruitment of children is an uphill battle within a brutal war. And no activists can work in highly radicalized areas, where a sinister form of manipulation is used as ammunition.
We met Ibrahim and his mother, Rania, in a hotel in Southern Turkey. They were too afraid of ISIS sleeper cells to meet elsewhere. We can't show you their faces.
Before the revolution, Ibrahim loved math and dreamed of being an aeronautical engineer. His father was killed by a sniper in 2012, leaving his mother alone with three children. Ibrahim was 13 years old when ISIS took his town of Deir el-Zour, and enlisted him and his friends.
IBRAHIM, Former ISIS Soldier (through translator): They started to recite verses from the Koran, speeches from Mohammed. They said they were the real Islamic State and would fulfill all the obligations of Islam. They came to us and said, you will be martyrs and you will earn paradise and virgins.
MARCIA BIGGS: He says he began as an informer, and then graduated to weapons training.
IBRAHIM (through translator): They had me be a rat for the people who smoked, who didn't go to mosque. They forced me to follow the women who didn't wear the right clothes and bring them in from the street. Sometimes, they brought captive soldiers, and they told us, if you want to kill any of these prisoners, you are allowed to kill them.
SUMMARY: How will Donald Trump's recent criticism of Khizr and Ghazala Khan's speech and his comments on Russia and Ukraine affect his campaign? And as both candidates go after Rust Belt voters, whose strategy will prevail? Gwen Ifill talks with Tamara Keith of NPR and Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): For more on the fight between Donald Trump and the Khan family, his recent comments on Russia's intervention in Ukraine, and Hillary Clinton's weekend outreach to Rust Belt voters, it's time for Politics Monday with Tamara Keith of NPR and Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report.
You just heard Ghazala Khan say to Judy in response to the questions about Donald Trump's feud, whatever it is, that, “I can take it.”
We have heard in the last few moments Warren Buffett on behalf of Hillary Clinton say, have you no decency, sir? You have made no sacrifice.
We heard John McCain also scold, but not withdraw his endorsement today of Donald Trump.
I wonder, starting with you, Amy, whether it's ever a good thing to have to defend yourself by tweet?
AMY WALTER, The Cook Political Report: No, but at the same time, nothing about this campaign has seemed normal. Right?
The traditional candidate response to a speech like Mr. Khan gave would be to say, my condolences for your loss. Here is my differences of opinion on the policy of it, right? I differed with Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration on the war on terror. I differed with President Bush on going to Iraq in the very first place, even though he did say he supported it early on, when he invaded Iraq.
But that is the answer that a traditional politician would give. And, Gwen, I just feel I should just come out here with a tape recorder and just every week say, nothing that he does is like a traditional politician would ever do.
What we are seeing is, his supporters, I think, will continue to rally around him, but every day that this campaign is about Donald Trump and his messaging, which is not — which is about him and not about the bigger, broader issues, I don't think that's a good day for Donald Trump.
GWEN IFILL: Let's flip the script a little bit.
Hillary Clinton, it seems to me, was asked about Pat Smith, the Benghazi mom, who spoke at the Republican Convention, and what was her reaction?
TAMARA KEITH, NPR: Her reaction was more the typical politician answer. It was, thank you for your family's service. I can't begin to understand your loss, that kind of thing.
And then she did get to the question of whether she remembered it the same way. But she remained respectful throughout, and you wouldn't call it a feud.
That's the difference is, in the way Hillary Clinton answered, it ended there. And look at George W. Bush. Cindy Sheehan was parked outside his ranch for a very long time protesting him, and George W. Bush…
GWEN IFILL: In 2008.
TAMARA KEITH: Was it — it was earlier. I think it was even maybe 2004.
GWEN IFILL: Yes.
AMY WALTER: Right. Right.
TAMARA KEITH: And George W. Bush said, that is her right, that is her right to protest, that is her right to say anything she wants about me, because this is America, actually.
SUMMARY: Khizr and Ghazala Khan, a Muslim-American couple whose 27-year-old son died as a soldier during the Iraq War, stood before the Democratic National Convention last week to share their loss and criticize Donald Trump. Lisa Desjardins recaps the political feud that ensued, then the Khans sit down with Judy Woodruff to discuss Trump's comments about Muslims, terrorism and immigration.
