Phil Gurski, thank you for visiting us here in The Hague, Leiden University. You've been an Analyst with the Canadian Intelligence Community for many years. And also advisor on Canada's Countering Violent Extremism project. And after you retired, if you decide to share your knowledge your expertise with a wider audience. And one way to do this is writing books and we would like to ask a few questions about your latest book Western Foreign Fighters, The Threat to Homeland and International Security by Phil Gurski. In this book, you address a number of very basic questions. Who are they, why did they go there, the role of women, etc. Well, what, to your eyes, is the most fundamental question that you try to address in this book? >> I think that there's three fundamental issues. The first one is really to determine the motivations for foreign fighters. We have this assumptions that they are losers, or that they are all unemployed or they are mentally ill. And I show them that its categorically not true, at least not all cases although each country will vary depending on their population size. And I drop parallels between why people join armies, what are their motivations. Some want to defeat evil. Some want to have job. Some feel that there's a call for them to do something, and we see some parallels with foreign fighters. The second question is what threat do they pose? What threat do they pose before they go, while they're in theatre and when they come back? And perhaps the third, most important question is what can we do about it? What are the policies we can put in place? What are legislation we can put in place? And, perhaps more broadly, what programs can we put in place? To address people who are radicalizing the violence and who may in fact at some point want to join a terrorist group abroad. I tried to answer each of those questions in a relatively short book. >> Well, there's a lot of attention for this problem. It's high on security agendas. And there's a lot of debates in the media and politics I'm sure you follow that debate, and you hear a lot of assumptions. You see stereotypes, perhaps even myth. So if you look at your findings as an analyst, but also writing this book, specifically on western foreign fighters, how do your findings relate to what we see in the media? And you come across the false assumptions or do we get it right? >> We get it right and we get it wrong, I think there are two major false assumptions. The first one relates to why they go and I kind of retalked about that. Some of these people really thought they're doing good, they had seen the atrocities of the government, focus on Islamic state, they had seen the bombing, they had seen the chemical weapons and they wanted to help and they couldn't sit back and say we can't, we must do something, we can't sit back and let people die. >> The second false assumption is that it all come back as raving terrorist, we're going to blow things up in Western Europe or in North America. Clearly some have, the Paris bombings the Brussel bombings have been carried out by trained foreign fighters. But if you look at research by people like Thomas Hake Hammer in Norway, in fact only about ten percent of returning foreign fighters historically like the through the Afghan or Somalia and Bosnia came back to carry out terrorist attacks in their home countries. That's both good news and bad news. It means that 90% don't do that, at least not immediately. And that causes some issues with, are they disturbed psychologically from what they've seen? Are they injured physically? Are they disgruntled and disillusioned by what they saw? Can they be used in programs to persuade people not to join terrorist groups? So that's good. The not so good part is that if it is only three percent which 10%? And I think if he fall to security alarms of personation agencies to adapt and verify those coming back terrorist attack. It's called easy. But don't come back attack to other forehead saying I'm the guy that's going to blowup the airport in Paris. So it's a bit of a challenge for security intelligence in law enforcement, but the good news is that not all of them come back with that intent. So I think the media is kind of exaggerated what this represents. It's real and it's serious and we need to have the resources to address it, but it's not existential. Nor is any terrorist existential to the west. So I think we gotta be careful with the words in the way we portray these things. >> So the media should read it, who else? Who you hope that reads this book and can improve policy, or a better understanding of the phenomenon? So what's your ideal target? >> My ideal target. Definitely, people who take terrorism MOOC courses online should read this book. I did spend 18 months in a policy world with the Canadian government, and I think I do have policy recommendations. All of my colleagues in intelligence should read it. I think scholars of modern terrorism should read it. I think people who like at violent extremism should read it. And even though it's published by an academic publisher, it's written in a very what I think to be easy to read, non-academic prose. So it really is intended for a mass market as well. Well, I can recommend the book, in fact I've written a recommendation. And it's accessible, it gives you a good overview. And I think it's very important that we address fundamental questions, and especially on a topic that's debated. A lot of policy makers have all kinds of ideas how to deal with that. And I think this book is a valuable contribution to that debate. So, I would highly recommend it and thank you for being here. >> Thank you.
