    [Senate Hearing 114-566]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

                                                            S. Hrg. 114-566

                            INSIDE THE MIND OF ISIS:
      UNDERSTANDING ITS GOALS AND IDEOLOGY TO BETTER PROTECT THE HOMELAND

    =======================================================================

                                     HEARING

                                   BEFORE THE

                                  COMMITTEE ON
                   HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
                              UNITED STATES SENATE

                        ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS

                                 SECOND SESSION

                                   __________

                                JANUARY 20, 2016

                                   __________

            Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.fdsys.gov/

                           Printed for the use of the
            Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

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           COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS

                        RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin Chairman
    JOHN McCAIN, Arizona                 THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware
    ROB PORTMAN, Ohio                    CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri
    RAND PAUL, Kentucky                  JON TESTER, Montana
    JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma             TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin
    MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming             HEIDI HEITKAMP, North Dakota
    KELLY AYOTTE, New Hampshire          CORY A. BOOKER, New Jersey
    JONI ERNST, Iowa                     GARY C. PETERS, Michigan
    BEN SASSE, Nebraska

                        Keith B. Ashdown, Staff Director
                 David S. Luckey, Director of Homeland Security
                 Elizabeth McWhorter, Professional Staff Member
                   Shad A. Thomas, U.S. Coast Guard Detailee
                  Gabrielle A. Batkin, Minority Staff Director
               John P. Kilvington, Minority Deputy Staff Director
           Harlan C. Geer, Minority Senior Professional Staff Member
         Stephen R. Vina, Minority Chief Counsel for Homeland Security
                         Laura W. Kilbride, Chief Clerk
                       Benjamin C. Grazda, Hearing Clerk

                                C O N T E N T S

                                     ------
    Opening statements:
                                                                       Page
        Senator Johnson..............................................     1
        Senator Carper...............................................     2
        Senator Peters...............................................    17
        Senator Portman..............................................    20
        Senator Heitkamp.............................................    23
        Senator Booker...............................................    25
        Senator Ernst................................................    27
        Senator Ayotte...............................................    30
    Prepared statements:
        Senator Johnson..............................................    41
        Senator Carper...............................................    42

                                    WITNESS
                          Wednesday, January 20, 2016

    Bernard Haykel, D. Phil., Director, The Institute of
      Transregional Studies, and Professor of Near Eastern Studies,
      Princeton University...........................................     4
    Jessica Stern, Ph.D., Research Professor, Pardee School for
      Global Studies, Boston University..............................     6
    Lorenzo Vidino, Ph.D., Director, Program on Extremism, Center for
      Cyber and Homeland Security, George Washington University......     7
    Hedieh Mirahmadi, President, World Organization for Resource
      Development and Education......................................     9

                         Alphabetical List of Witnesses

    Haykel, Bernard D.Phil.:
        Testimony....................................................     4
        Prepared statement...........................................    44
    Mirahmadi, Hedieh:
        Testimony....................................................     9
        Prepared statement...........................................    76
    Stern, Jessica, Ph.D.:
        Testimony....................................................     6
        Prepared statement...........................................    50
    Vidino, Lorenzo Ph.D.:
        Testimony....................................................     7
        Prepared statement...........................................    64

                                    APPENDIX

    Responses to post-hearing questions for the Record from:
        Mr. Haykel...................................................    81
        Ms. Stern....................................................    83
        Mr. Vidino...................................................    85
        Ms. Mirahmadi................................................    87

                            INSIDE THE MIND OF ISIS:
      UNDERSTANDING ITS GOALS AND IDEOLOGY TO BETTER PROTECT THE HOMELAND

                                  ----------

                          WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2016

                                         U.S. Senate,
                               Committee on Homeland Security
                                      and Governmental Affairs,
                                                        Washington, DC.
        The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:02 a.m., in
    room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Ron Johnson,
    Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
        Present: Senators Johnson, Portman, Lankford, Ayotte,
    Ernst, Sasse, Carper, McCaskill, Tester, Heitkamp, Booker, and
    Peters.

                 OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN JOHNSON

        Chairman Johnson. This hearing will come to order.
        I want to welcome everybody and say good morning. I
    certainly want to thank the witnesses for taking the time to
    appear, for taking the time to really write, I think, some very
    thoughtful and revealing testimony.
        I would ask unanimous consent to enter my written opening
    statement in the record,\1\ and Senator Carper is generally
    pretty good about not objecting.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Senator Johnson appears in the
    Appendix on page 41.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Senator Carper. Oh, I will allow it.
        Chairman Johnson. But, without objection, so ordered.
        Let me just explain a little bit. Really, this hearing has
    been in the works for quite some time, and it was really
    spawned by somebody who could not be here because of scheduling
    conflicts of the Committee as well as himself. But Graeme Wood
    wrote, I thought, a very interesting article published in The
    Atlantic a number of months ago, ``Inside the Mind of ISIS.''
    And I would say that it certainly caught this Senator, and I
    think an awful lot of people, policymakers in Washington, D.C.,
    here, somewhat by surprise. It was pretty revealing. I have
    talked to enough people that really did not understand the
    importance of the territorial gains and holdings to create the
    caliphate and the chain of events which that set up.
        So, we started discussions, and although we do not have Mr.
    Wood here today, we have, I think--he is a reporter. We have
    the experts that I think he consulted with, in terms of writing
    his thoughtful article, and so I am really looking forward to
    the testimony here today.
        I just want to throw out one little statistic, and this
    comes from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism
    and Responses to Terrorism (START) from the State Department.
    The START Report, which they initially published in 2012. The
    progression and the growth of terrorism is stark, and did we
    ever get to the bottom of the differences in the numbers from
    2014? OK. Which should I use? OK, those are even worse.
        So from 2012, the number of attacks reported by the State
    Department in this report was 6,771. In 2014, the number of
    attacks had grown to 16,800 worldwide. That is 2.5 times the
    number of attacks just 2 years earlier.
        In terms of deaths, in 2012 there were 11,000 individuals
    killed in terrorist attacks. In 2014, there were 43,500. That
    is almost a fourfold increase in terrorist attacks.
        So the fact of the matter is, the risk, the threat of
    Islamic terror, from my standpoint, it is real. It is growing,
    and statistics prove it. And there is no way that we are going
    to be able to adequately address this unless we fully
    understand what motivates Islamic terrorists. This hearing is
    specifically about the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)--
    but I think that we can talk about Islamic terrorists, in
    general, and explore that--and what is their ultimate goal. And
    I think that we will hear testimony that we have some
    contradictory goals as well, which makes it even more confusing
    in terms of how we deal with the issue.
        But, again, I just want to thank my witnesses, and with
    that I will turn it over to Senator Carper.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER

        Senator Carper. Thanks. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. It is great
    to see all of you today. Thanks for your preparation, thanks
    for joining us, and for your willingness to testify and to
    respond to our questions. And I thank the Chairman for calling
    the hearing.
        One of the most important jobs of our government--in fact,
    State and Federal and local as well--is to make sure that our
    people are safe. That is what this Committee focuses on.
        As the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks showed us,
    ISIS and ISIS-inspired attacks remain a major threat in this
    country. In fact, just last week, ISIS carried out attacks
    against our allies in Turkey and I believe in Indonesia.
        Today, we are going to look at ISIS's ideology and how it
    hopes to achieve its goals. One of ISIS's key strengths is the
    large number of recruits that they are able to pull in. And
    despite the heavy losses inflicted on ISIS by coalition forces
    in recent months, the number of ISIS fighters on the ground in
    Iraq and Syria remains pretty much the same thanks to a stream
    of new recruits flowing into the region on a regular basis.
        ISIS also appears to have a significant online army that
    grows daily, and these ``virtual'' soldiers may never set foot
    in the territory that ISIS controls, but they are waging an
    aggressive social media campaign that calls on people to do the
    group's bidding from thousands of miles away. These battlefield
    recruits and online supporters are attracted not only to ISIS's
    ideology, but to its image as well.
        And what is that image? Well, the image that ISIS would
    like to project is that of a winner. And even as it suffers
    serious defeats on the battlefield--I think the amount of land
    they control in Syria and Iraq is down by about 30 percent in
    recent months and continues to diminish. But even as they
    suffer serious defeats on the battlefield and lose key leaders,
    ISIS still attempts to project an image of indestructibility.
    And they do this through fictitious claims and propaganda on
    social media, and also by ignoring the truth about the progress
    that coalition forces are making. This winner message appeals
    to many young men who crave fame, fortune, love, and increased
    social standing.
        Just as troubling is the fact that ISIS has successfully
    advanced a twisted narrative that the United States is at war
    with Islam and that it is the duty of young Muslims to defend
    their religion by attacking the United States and our allies.
        Nothing could be further from the truth. That is not what
    we are about. We know that, and it is important that we convey
    that consistently throughout the world.
        This battle is not against a religion. This battle is
    against ISIS, plain and simple. ISIS is a cowardly group of
    murderers who kill Muslims, kill Jews, and kill Christians
    alike. They have no regard for human life. The estimated 30,000
    ISIS fighters have nothing to do with the 1.5 billion Muslim
    men and women who peacefully practice their religion around the
    world and in our communities.
        At the end of the day, this battle against ISIS is a war of
    words and ideas as much as it is a war of military power and
    action. That is why it is so important that we not only
    continue to crush ISIS on the battlefield, but also counter
    their hateful message.
        To this end, last month I introduced legislation that would
    create and authorize an office at the Department of Homeland
    Security (DHS) to counter the violent messages of ISIS and
    other terror groups. I welcome all of my colleagues to join me
    on this important piece of legislation. We will be talking
    about it during the course of this hearing further.
        This fight against ISIS, however, is not solely the
    responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security or any
    single Federal agency. All of us have a role to play, and we
    have an obligation to say something if we see something
    suspicious.
        And we all, especially those of us in public office, have a
    responsibility to be mindful of the words we use when we talk
    about Islam and the 1.5 billion Muslims around the world who
    practice their religion peacefully. They live in our States.
    They live in our neighborhoods, and they believe as fervently
    as we do in the Golden Rule: to treat other people the way that
    we want to be treated. We need to work to ensure that the
    rhetoric that we use does not play into the hands of ISIS to be
    used against us as a weapon.
        When we make careless comments about the nature of Islam or
    the need to keep Muslims out of the United States for political
    purposes, we feed ISIS's narrative that the United States is at
    war with Muslims.
        We have to be smarter than that. I think we are. Our
    country is better than that. We do not need to engage in
    demagoguery or run from our moral obligations in order to keep
    Americans safe.
        Let me close by just saying I look forward to learning more
    today about ISIS's ideology and tactics as well as what more we
    can do to address the root causes of this difficult challenge.
        With that, welcome and thank you.
        Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Carper.
        It is the tradition of this Committee to swear in
    witnesses, so if you will all rise and raise your right hand.
    Do you swear that the testimony you will give before this
    Committee today will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
    but the truth, so help you, God?
        Mr. Haykel. I do.
        Ms. Stern. I do.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. I do.
        Mr. Vidino. I do.
        Chairman Johnson. Please be seated.
        Our first witness is Dr. Bernard Haykel. Dr. Haykel is the
    professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Director of the
    Institute for Transregional Studies of the Contemporary Middle
    East, North Africa, and Central Asia at Princeton University.
    He is a historian of the Arabian Peninsula and a scholar of
    Islamic law and Islamic political movements. His research is
    concerned with political and social tensions that arise from
    questions about religious identity and authority, and he has
    been described as ``the foremost secular authority on the
    Islamic State's ideology.'' Dr. Haykel.

        TESTIMONY OF BERNARD HAYKEL, D.PHIL.,\1\ DIRECTOR, THE
       INSTITUTE OF TRANSREGIONAL STUDIES, AND PROFESSOR OF NEAR
                 EASTERN STUDIES, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

        Mr. Haykel. Thank you very much. It is a privilege and an
    honor to be here today. I have 5 minutes, so I will be quite
    telegraphic, and I really have three or four points to make.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Haykel appears in the Appendix on
    page 44.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        The first is that ISIS is a religious movement with set
    political goals. The principal goal is the empowerment of Sunni
    Muslims against a long list of enemies. The origins of ISIS lie
    in a complex set of factors, a very complex context in the
    Middle East. It involves a religious revival that started in
    the 1970s. You have a situation where the governments of this
    region are uniformly authoritarian, brutal, and have each
    eviscerated the social fabric as well as the civic societies
    that they dominate.
        You have relative economic deprivation. You have a massive
    youth bulge, with 60 percent of the population under the age of
    25. You have bad governance, as I have already mentioned. And
    you also have several wars.
        The most proximate war for ISIS's development is the war in
    Iraq and the U.S. invasion in 2003. And then some have even
    attributed climate change as a cause for this kind of
    radicalization.
        Now, this movement is extremely adept, as you have noted,
    at using social media to propagate its culture of victimization
    as well as the sanctification of violence. And they argue that
    violence is the only means to address the weaknesses of
    Muslims. They target a long list of enemies, principally
    Shiites, as well as other Sunnis who disagree with them,
    secular people, anyone who believes in democracy, or any of the
    modern ideologies of our age.
        They also have developed a culture, which is a fantasy, of
    what early Islam was like, which they are trying to reproduce.
    This is a culture that is extremely rich and taps into a very
    deep vein in the history of Islamic civilization and in the
    text of Islamic civilization.
        Now, I believe that there is no silver-bullet solution to
    ISIS. It is a symptom of deep structural problems in the
    region. Military defeat, while very welcome, would not address
    the problem of ISIS. And, moreover, the United States does not
    have the tools nor does the United States have the religious
    standing to speak authoritatively on what is or is not Islamic.
        I believe that ISIS today is, in fact, being defeated
    militarily. As you noted, they have lost 30 to 40 percent of
    their territory. But addressing the root causes that produce a
    phenomenon like ISIS is what is necessary, and this will take a
    generation to do. And most of the effort actually has to be
    done by people in the region of the Middle East and by Muslims
    throughout the world.
        I expect that as ISIS loses more and more territory and is
    defeated by groups like the Kurds or the Iraqi army, which is
    principally a Shiite-ruled and Shiite-dominated army, ISIS will
    become more desperate. And with desperation, we will see more
    lone-wolf and ISIS-directed attacks in the West. It is very
    important not to overreact to these attacks because it will
    play into ISIS's narrative.
        And I also think that lone-wolf attacks are extremely
    difficult to stop. We must definitely mobilize our own Muslim
    community against ISIS's ideology. They are the first and best
    line of defense against this movement.
        I also would like to underscore that ISIS should not be
    seen as an existential threat. If we speak of it as an
    existential threat, we also play into its narrative. So the
    solution, I think, is one that would require patience, but also
    hard-nosed realism and a strategy of not overreacting to its
    attacks on us and on others.
        Thank you very much.
        Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Dr. Haykel.
        Our next witness is Dr. Jessica Stern. Dr. Stern is a
    research professor at Boston University's Pardee School of
    Global Studies and an Advanced Academic Candidate at the
    Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis. She was a member of
    Hoover Institution's Task Force on National Security and Law.
    She is a Fulbright Scholar and earned a Guggenheim Fellowship
    for her work on trauma and violence. And, finally, she is an
    expert on terrorism and co-authored the book ``ISIS: The State
    of Terror,'' and authored the book ``Terror in the Name of God:
    Why Religious Militants Kill,'' among other works. Dr. Stern.

       TESTIMONY OF JESSICA STERN, PH.D.,\1\ RESEARCH PROFESSOR,
          PARDEE SCHOOL FOR GLOBAL STUDIES, BOSTON UNIVERSITY

        Ms. Stern. Chairman Johnson, Ranking Member Carper, and
    distinguished Members of the Committee, thank you so much for
    inviting me here. It is an honor to be here to speak to you
    about a topic I have been working on since the 1980s.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Stern appears in the Appendix on
    page 50.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        My dissertation adviser was Ash Carter, and he thought back
    then that it was weird that I was obsessed with terrorism,
    Iraq, and chemical weapons. He has admitted in public that he
    maybe was wrong at the time.
        When we think about what ISIS wants, I think there are two
    different aspects. One is: What does it want collectively? What
    does the group want? And here we see two contradictory goals.
    On the one hand, the group wants to run and spread its
    caliphate, not just in Iraq and Syria but in its so-called wil
    ayat, or provinces. One of the most important of these
    provinces is in Libya.
        At the same time, ISIS wants to polarize Muslim against
    Muslim, Muslim against non-Muslim, and goad us into sending
    ground forces to fight out a final battle in the town of Dabiq.
        These are obviously contradictory goals. I believe ISIS
    will continue to pursue both of those goals--trying to spread
    the caliphate and also trying to goad us into sending in ground
    forces to destroy the State.
        The second part of the question is: What do individual
    members think they will get from joining this terrible
    organization? Well, in the region, as Professor Haykel has been
    saying, they are looking for security. ISIS is capitalizing on
    poor governance and the disenfranchisement of Sunnis.
    Individuals are also seeking power, status, redemption, and the
    lure of living in what they call the only Sharia-based state,
    though we have to remember that many people living in ISIS-
    controlled territory are trapped there. They are not remotely
    interested in this ideology.
        More importantly for us, in terms of our national security,
    is why Westerners are joining. Here I think that there is a
    desire to reinvent themselves, reinvent society, and to seek a
    new and clear identity. Interestingly, the work of Lorenzo
    Vidino has shown that 40 percent of those who have been
    arrested are converts. ISIS is a new religion. Everyone who
    joins it is a convert. But we are also seeing non-Muslims
    attracted to this way of becoming a hero and having an
    adventure.
        Our military response addresses the problem over there, but
    obviously it does not address the problem of homegrown
    recruits. Here we have to think seriously about how to get
    better at containing ISIS's ideology. I think everyone needs to
    be involved in this--the private sector and schools, for
    example. Ignorance about Islam is a vulnerability. Mothers are
    a key factor in fighting this problem. They imagine their kids
    are safe when they are inside on the Internet. We see this
    especially in refugee communities, where moms think, ``Great,
    my son is inside on the Internet. He is safe.'' We need to
    teach those moms that this is not true.
        It requires a global effort to find a new way for kids to
    feel that they can find an identity with dignity and honor.
        Finally, I want to say that there is a problem for scholars
    who want to study the mind of the terrorist. Institutional
    Review Boards (IRBs) make it very difficult for scholars to ask
    such questions as: Were you recruited by ISIS? Why did you
    think about joining? Why did you not join? I cannot ask those
    questions. If somebody says, ``Yes,'' referring to recruitment
    or joining, then I have to report them to the Department of
    Homeland Security, and then I am in trouble with the
    Institutional Review Board (IRB). This needs to be revised. At
    this point, IRBs, as applied to national security affairs, are
    a threat to national security.
        Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Dr. Stern.
        Our next witness is Dr. Lorenzo Vidino. Dr. Vidino is the
    Director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington
    University's Center for Cyber and Homeland Security. He
    specializes in Islamism and political violence in Europe and
    North America. The program he directs at George Washington
    recently published a report called ``ISIS in America: A
    Detailed Look at Legal Cases of Jihadism in the United
    States.'' Dr. Vidino.

    TESTIMONY OF LORENZO G. VIDINO, PH.D.,\1\ DIRECTOR, PROGRAM ON
       EXTREMISM, CENTER FOR CYBER AND HOMELAND SECURITY, GEORGE
                         WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

        Mr. Vidino. Thank you very much. Chairman Johnson, Ranking
    Member Carper, and distinguished Members of the Committee, it
    is a privilege to be speaking here in front of you today.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Vidino appears in the Appendix on
    page 64.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        While the vast majority of American Muslims clearly reject,
    as we heard, the Islamic State's narrative and tactics, the
    number of arrests and open investigations that we see
    throughout the country tell us that the current mobilization of
    Americans attracted to the Islamic State is unprecedented in
    size. It is also astonishingly diverse. It includes men and
    women, teenagers and men in their 40s, university students and
    petty criminals, people born into Islam and converts, and
    people born in America and recent immigrants. There is
    absolutely no such thing as a typical Islamic State sympathizer
    in America.
        Individuals with such diverse backgrounds are unlikely to
    be motivated by the same factors. Radicalization is a highly
    complex and individualized process, often shaped by a poorly
    understood mix of a variety of factors which are overlapping.
        One of them, which is cynically exploited by the propaganda
    of ISIS, is a deep sense of empathy for the suffering of the
    Syrian people, and that was true particularly at the beginning
    of the Syrian conflict. But by the time ISIS formally declared
    its caliphate in June 2014, the motivations of recruits appear
    to revolve more around fulfilling perceived religious
    obligations. Unquestionably, the main motivation today is that
    of living in a perfect Islamic society under the world's only
    authentic Islamic government, as its supporters believe the
    caliphate declared by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to be. Whether in
    online conversations or in interrogations with authorities
    following their arrest, the appeal of living in this utopian
    Islamic society is cited by the vast majority of American ISIS
    sympathizers.
        Indeed, despite the attention that it has received in the
    West, ISIS's main appeal is not so much in its sleek social
    media campaign. It is, rather, its territoriality, as you
    correctly said at the beginning. What matters is the message,
    the substance, not so much how the message is spread. So I
    think that there is a bit of a misguided focus on social media
    where in reality the issue is the core of the message.
        As is typical of an ideology that mixes politics and
    religion, the obligation to join and defend the caliphate spans
    both. Similarly, motivations professed by American jihadists
    often frame what could appear to be religious factors in
    political terms, and vice versa. Political grievances are seen
    through religious lenses. Similarly, their political solutions
    are framed as fulfillments of religious obligations.
        The political grievances of American ISIS sympathizers run
    the gamut. Some are of a global nature. But many American ISIS
    sympathizers are equally, if not more, interested in domestic
    events, such as the riots in Ferguson or the current debate
    about Islam in America. These events all represent, in the
    conspiratorial worldview they have adopted, proof of the evil
    nature of America and every other entity or idea that ISIS
    opposes.
        Religious and political motivations are also impossible to
    separate from personal ones, as Jessica was saying. A search
    for belonging, meaning, and identity appear to be crucial
    motivators for many Americans who embrace ISIS's ideology.
        Some individuals are particularly vulnerable, suffering
    from deep emotional issues or personality disorders. But in
    many other cases, the individuals who embrace ISIS's message
    are seemingly well adjusted. Rather, they are simply
    individuals on a personal quest.
        Moreover, most American ISIS sympathizers suffer from none
    of the socioeconomic and integration issues that are often,
    somewhat superficially, considered the main causes of
    radicalization of European Muslims, for example, therefore
    making the often adopted ``radicalization is caused by lack of
    integration'' mantra highly debatable. When looking for
    explanations of radicalization processes, I think it is
    arguable that psychology provides more answers than sociology.
        To conclude, ISIS is just the latest, and probably not the
    last, in a series of groups who have adopted what we would call
    ``jihadist ideology.'' The defeat of ISIS, as despicable as
    ISIS is, will not stop the violence. Only the defeat of
    jihadist ideology will, so the problem is much larger than
    ISIS.
        Thank you very much for your attention, and I look forward
    to your questions.
        Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Dr. Vidino.
        Our final witness is Dr. Hedieh Mirahmadi. Dr. Mirahmadi is
    the President of the World Organization for Resource
    Development and Education (WORDE). This nonprofit educational
    organization counters violent extremist ideologies by promoting
    charitable, service-oriented alternatives. She developed ``A
    Community-Based Approach to Countering Radicalization: A
    Partnership for America,'' one of the first Muslim-led reports
    to address grassroots strategies to counter violent extremism
    and build resilient communities. She also has a degree in
    Islamic doctrine and has contributed to books on related
    topics. Dr. Mirahmadi.

    TESTIMONY OF HEDIEH MIRAHMADI,\1\ PRESIDENT, WORLD ORGANIZATION
                 FOR RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION

        Ms. Mirahmadi. Thank you so much, Chairman Johnson, Ranking
    Member Carper, and distinguished Members of the Committee.
    Thank you for the honor of testifying before you today.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Mirahmadi appears in the Appendix
    on page 76.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Although the U.S. Government and our allies have spent
    millions of dollars in research to determine what is drawing
    Westerners to groups like ISIS, unfortunately we still do not
    have a terrorist profile. We actually cannot even prove one
    single factor to predict who would become a terrorist.
        But what we do know from the empirical research on
    convicted terrorists are some of the indicators that exist in
    many of those cases which may make an individual more
    vulnerable. We heard about several of those from both Jessica
    and Lorenzo. We also learned, as Lorenzo's report has told us,
    that over 40 percent of those arrested for ISIS-related crimes
    were Muslim converts, so that means that they grew up in a
    house that did not practice Islam. This tells us that no family
    is immune from the threat and that the solution will lie in a
    holistic approach.
        However, just because we cannot predict who will be a
    terrorist, it does not mean that we cannot or should not do
    anything or that what we do cannot be measured.
        In fact, we can design programs and clearly articulate a
    theory of change that connects the program activities with the
    risk factors that we are trying to reduce. If we measure those
    with traditional and innovative evaluation tools, we can show
    whether they reduced the vulnerabilities of program
    participants.
        At my organization, WORDE, that is what we did to create
    and adapt a community-led partnership with local government,
    known as the Montgomery County Model. I am pleased to say that
    after 2 years of rigorous scientific evaluation, funded by the
    National Institute of Justice, it is now the only evidence-
    based Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program in the
    country.
        It has a great potential to revolutionize community
    policing, allowing the community to lead and building
    relationships of trust and respect among diverse community
    members, rather than separating them off into silos that
    further feed distrust and isolation. This relationship among
    community members is more critical now than ever. Domestic
    terror attacks are creating fault lines in our society that
    will only lead to more violence if not repaired. The separation
    of Muslims from non-Muslims feeds into that bifurcated
    worldview of the terrorists who are saying, ``It is us versus
    them, the West against Islam.'' A comprehensive prevention
    agenda must include programs that prevent that divide, so that
    there is only an ``us'' against the terrorists.
        In response to the need for specialized individual
    interventions, we also provide counseling and direct services
    for those who may be at risk of radicalization, before they
    choose a path of violence. Ours is the first of its kind in the
    United States.
        Besides treating the psycho-social needs of clients, our
    team can also tackle the ideological risk factors by referring
    the individual to a mentor. It used to be that becoming a
    violent jihadist took years of religious indoctrination. The
    process was long because the Islam that they preached was so
    foreign to mainstream interpretations of the faith that they
    had to undo what Muslims have believed for centuries. And
    besides, their calls to suicide and killing of innocent
    civilians was, quite frankly, unappealing.
        Unfortunately, civil war in Syria, continued persecution of
    Sunnis in Iraq, and upheavals across the Middle East provided
    the perfect opportunity for the jihadist recruiters to
    reformulate the strategy. Constant depictions of torture and
    bombing of families in the region, motivated young Muslims
    across the world to go and join the ``humanitarian jihad'' and
    save Muslims who were dying at the hands of brutal dictators.
    Many of them were not even radicalized until they reached the
    battlefield. Suddenly, as if almost overnight, the terrorists
    had discovered the holy grail of recruitment: encourage people
    to come and build, not to come and die. That message would
    appeal to young and old alike, Muslim and non-Muslim. Anyone
    who saw the global powers as corrupt and oppressive would be
    welcome in this new utopia of misfits.
        As a result, taking someone off of the path now requires
    more than just a Muslim preacher. The process must include a
    culturally proficient, trained professional that can resolve
    the feelings of cultural homelessness and help the individual
    find a sense of belonging and purpose in our society.
        Since our program follows the protected health information
    guidelines of professionals, our client information is kept
    entirely outside the purview of law enforcement unless an
    individual is an ``imminent threat'' or a ``threat to national
    security.'' If we want to encourage more community groups to
    get involved or to enter this space, there needs to be more
    legal guidelines for practitioners, including how do we balance
    the privacy rights of our clients with national security
    interests.
        The government has created numerous violence prevention
    programs and alternatives to prison sentencing for all sorts of
    crimes. There is no reason why we cannot establish guidelines
    for extremist cases as well. Most importantly, communities need
    resources to create the multidisciplinary community-based
    prevention programs that can operate independently of law
    enforcement, as well as diversion programs that can actually
    treat radicalized individuals. It is impractical to think that
    we are going to arrest our way out of this problem. With
    thousands of individuals across the country that are vulnerable
    to radicalization, it is irresponsible of us not to create
    alternatives.
        Thank you.
        Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Dr. Mirahmadi.
        I will start with the questioning. I really do want to
    concentrate on trying to describe the full dimension of this
    problem. Senator Carper talked about the number of Muslims in
    the world. There are about 1.6 billion, according to Pew
    Research. Dr. Haykel, do you have any sense in terms of what
    percent of the Muslim population would identify with this
    extreme version of radical Islam, Islamic terrorism? Because
    one percent would be 16 million.
        Mr. Haykel. Right. Senator, you put your finger on it,
    which is that even a small percentage of people who identify
    with this movement would still be a very large number.
        I think, though, when it comes to identification, one has
    to make certain distinctions. So, for example, in Saudi Arabia,
    a country that I visit often, there are a number of people who
    do not actually share the Islamic State's ideology or goals--
    they would never want to be ruled by the Islamic State--but
    nonetheless feel that they are the good guys out there fighting
    the good fight because they are fighting against Shiites, they
    are fighting against Americans, and so on.
        There are people in the Middle East, for instance, who
    would never want to be ruled by them and do not identify with
    them, but still see them as heroes.
        Chairman Johnson. And support them financially?
        Mr. Haykel. Private individuals may support them
    financially.
        Chairman Johnson. So, again, is one percent wildly too
    large? Again, I am just trying to get some sort of feel,
    because often we say, well, this is just a very small
    percentage, but a very small percentage could be a very large
    problem.
        Mr. Haykel. Right. So in terms of actual recruits, I think
    the numbers and estimates that I have seen vary from about
    30,000 to 100,000. A hundred thousand out of 1.5 billion is a
    very small----
        Chairman Johnson. But, again, that is recruits into ISIS,
    into the caliphate.
        Mr. Haykel. Yes, that is right, people who are fighting.
        Chairman Johnson. There are news reports that show that
    there are ISIS-affiliated branches in 30 different countries.
    We are seeing ISIS move into Afghanistan to take over the poppy
    fields.
        You were talking about how we do not want to overreact.
        Mr. Haykel. Right.
        Chairman Johnson. And, by the way, I realize ISIS is not
    going to come in and invade America and offer an existential
    threat here. I do not want to be putting ideas into the minds
    of terrorists. But, it does not take much of an imagination to
    understand that a coordinated homegrown terrorist effort could
    do unbelievable economic harm. Brussels did not have a
    terrorist attack, and yet it shut down after the Paris attack.
    So we have heard that we should adopt a strategy of strategic
    patience. OK, we do not want to overreact, but as long as ISIS
    maintains that territory, they are going to continue to inspire
    what could be incredibly damaging events--maybe not
    existential, but unbelievably damaging.
        So how do we deal with it? I mean, do we recognize that
    territory is the primary motivator? Come and build, as Dr.
    Mirahmadi was talking about? Come and build, build that utopian
    society. As long as that territory exists, we are going to be
    under threat. And, again, we will continue to be--even if we
    defeat ISIS, even if we deny them the territory, we have all
    these affiliates, all these branches of this extreme ideology
    around the world.
        So what is the full extent of this threat? I do not think
    strategic patience is working.
        Mr. Haykel. Well, military victory is the most significant
    contributor to recruitment. The fact that in 2014 they were
    able to conquer so much territory----
        Chairman Johnson. ISIS's military victory?
        Mr. Haykel. Correct. It made it seem like the reality was
    confirming that they were chosen by God to represent Muslims
    and to win in the name of Islam. So making them lose militarily
    is extremely important in drying up the fantasy that they are
    projecting and the appeal that they have to recruits. So it is
    very important to defeat them militarily.
        Chairman Johnson. But, again, would you be describing that
    as an overreaction? I want to go to Dr. Stern because you are
    talking about the contradictory goals, which are: grow this
    movement, grow the caliphate, and, at the same time, draw us in
    to defeat them, so that they end up with the final battle of
    Dabiq, or whatever. What is the name of that? Yes, Dabiq. Talk
    about that. Talk about that contradiction.
        Ms. Stern. Yes, there is a contradiction. I do not think
    that our policy should be dictated just because they want us to
    fight them in a final battle in Dabiq. I mean, I do think that
    we need to fight them. I think anything we can do to not feed
    into their fantasy that the West is at war with Islam is good.
    Therefore, special forces are better than big armies. Sunni
    Arab forces are much better than Western forces. But, I think
    it is important to point out that, as you say, this
    organization is now in many parts of the world. In Libya, it is
    very important. Afghanistan--it is also there. It is an
    ideology that is here as well.
        I am not sure that the victory narrative that I know you
    are quite interested in is so important. I think that, in a
    sense--why victory? Victory is important because of this sense
    of disenfranchisement, humiliation, and the sense that Islam
    has fallen behind the West. It has. We need to find a way for
    young Muslims and those who sympathize with them, including
    converts, to find another way to be heroes.
        Chairman Johnson. But rebuilding these societies that have
    existed for quite some time, these governments that are
    authoritarian and that offend our sensibility of freedom and
    democracy, that is a long-term project. Can we sit back and be
    strategically patient and allow this caliphate and the
    territory to exist and have that threat continue to grow?
    Because I think that it will continue to grow.
        One way that we can counteract that goal is to not let the
    final battle be in Dabiq. Let us take Dabiq first and let the
    final battle be someplace else. I am not being flippant here.
    We have to understand what they are trying to accomplish, but,
    again, I just do not think that we can be strategically
    patient. I think that we have to defeat them. I think that we
    have to deny that territory as our first step in a very long
    struggle. And let us face it, this struggle--let me be clear.
    We are not declaring war on Islamic terrorists. They declared
    war on us--I think, definitely starting in the early 1990s with
    the bombing of the USS Cole, and the attack in Saudi Arabia,
    and then the attempt to take down the Twin Towers initially in
    New York. If you are going to end a war, there are two ways of
    doing it: either both sides agree to end the war--and it is
    obvious to me that Islamic terrorists are not agreeing to end
    the war--or one side has to be defeated.
        And so, trying to make this simple, I sit there and go,
    well, this caliphate is something that is pretty attractive.
    People want to go there. They want to either get there
    physically or become adherents and, as they are being
    encouraged to, kill where they are.
        So, to me, that is the first step that we have to
    undertake, and the sooner, the better. I just do not think that
    we can be strategically patient.
        I will go to you, Dr. Vidino.
        Mr. Vidino. You are absolutely right. I think the reason
    for ISIS's success is its success, the fact that it has
    controlled territory. I think that if the Syrian conflict had
    gone in a different way for a variety reasons, and Jhabat al-
    Nusra had taken over territory and created this State-like
    structure, Jhabat al-Nusra would be the big problem that we
    would be facing. I think ISIS was just better militarily, but
    there were a lot of circumstances there on the ground that led
    ISIS to be the one controlling territory. But it is that
    territoriality which is the main appeal for a lot of people,
    whether it is in the Middle East or here, in the West.
        I think that to some degree--I do not want to be overly
    negative, but it is almost too late because the State has been
    around for a year and a half now. So that idea, even if we were
    tomorrow to completely destroy what is the Islamic State, the
    idea or the fact that they created that society for a year and
    a half will linger for a long time, and you will find plenty of
    groups that will try to re-create that.
        Obviously, there are also, from a secret military and
    terrorism point of view, significant problems in keeping that
    structure there. There is more pressure on them now, and it
    makes it, to some degree, more difficult to expand their
    territory. They are losing territory. There is some pressure
    that does not allow them to plan attacks in the way that they
    would probably have been able to a few months ago, but now they
    are indeed planning them more. So, yes, they are being bombed.
    They are running from place to place, to some degree. But part
    of that strategy has been that they are also trying to carry
    out attacks, and I think Paris was obviously probably the first
    successful one, at least in the West, of an attack that was
    planned with some strategy. It was not just left to some lone
    individual to carry out. There was some strategy behind it,
    some planning, centralized planning involved.
        Clearly, I think that is one of the lessons from the 9/11
    Commission. The more you allow an organization, a terrorist
    organization--and ISIS is more than a terrorist organization,
    but the more that you allow them to plan and have a sanctuary,
    the more dangerous they are going to be.
        Chairman Johnson. They have revenue streams. They control
    research labs within universities. I will just quickly let Dr.
    Mirahmadi comment, and then I will turn it over to Senator
    Carper.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Well, I definitely agree with the comments
    of my colleagues. I just want to add, though, that I think,
    long term and generationally, we are not going to bomb our way
    out of this problem. So even if we solve the military battles
    and we win against ISIS in terms of its controlling territory,
    ISIS is just a metastasized version of al-Qaeda and the groups
    that came before it.
        So I think that what we really need to bring to bear on
    this struggle is our other resources, both domestically and
    through foreign policy. For example, let us face it, our
    Western governments have been complicit or tacitly allowed a
    lot of the Gulf States to export this very virulent, intolerant
    ideology across the Muslim world and throughout Western
    countries. It has destroyed the cultural fabric of a lot of
    these countries. I mean, thousands and thousands of Pakistanis,
    Afghanis, Asians, and Africans have died trying to defeat it.
        So I think that it is very important that we use our
    diplomatic leverage with those countries to tell them to stop
    exporting that stuff and try fixing all the damage that they
    have caused so far.
        In addition, we should also bolster the efforts of
    countries like Egypt, who is now in a post-Islamist government
    who wants to use its might and its religious infrastructure to
    start exporting the opposite--start exporting a pluralistic
    interpretation of Islam. And that, quite frankly, is the core,
    it is the mainstream fundamental of Islam, so let us help them
    and empower them to be able to do this in a way that is
    authentic to the rest of the Muslim world.
        So I think that from a foreign policy perspective, we still
    have a lot of resources to bear on this problem that we need to
    use long term. And then domestically, as I mentioned, we need
    to be intervening and preventing the radicalization in the
    first place.
        Chairman Johnson. So, again, I understand that it is a
    multifaceted, generational problem, but just a quick answer. We
    have to deny them that territory, correct?
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Yes, absolutely.
        Chairman Johnson. The fact that the caliphate exists is a
    real problem.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Absolutely. But, we still have all these
    other steps that we have to simultaneously----
        Chairman Johnson. I know. It is a nasty, big problem. I got
    it. OK, Senator Carper.
        Senator Carper. Again, our thanks to each of you for
    joining us today. Dr. Stern, thank you for writing a couple of
    really good books, really informative books, in one of them,
    ``Terror in the Name of God,'' which I was struck by the way
    you went into--literally across the world, right into the heart
    of the centers of these violent folks, these violent groups,
    and talked to them. Why did they let you in? And why did they
    open up like that to you? It was amazing to me.
        Ms. Stern. Terrorists, in my experience, young people,
    really do want to talk, and that is one of the reasons that I
    am frustrated that at a university it is impossible for me to
    replicate that kind of work, even in prisons. It is very hard
    for us to get into prisons because of the IRB rules at our
    universities and also at the prisons. There is a wealth of
    information that we could be collecting.
        I also think that Saudi Arabia is actually, perhaps
    ironically, at
    the cutting edge in thinking about prevention and
    counterradicalization. They have been spreading this Wahhabi
    ideology everywhere where they think it might work.
        I just came back from Bosnia a couple of days ago. They
    have been very active in Bosnia. Bosnia is very vulnerable now.
    Why can't we--and you know a lot about this, Dr. Haykel--try to
    get them to help run a prevention and counterradicalization
    campaign? They did not mean to be spreading ISIS ideology. They
    meant to be spreading Wahhabi ideology.
        What do you think of that, Dr. Haykel?
        Senator Carper. Go ahead, Dr. Haykel. What do you think
    about that?
        Mr. Haykel. I think that the Saudis are extremely important
    in this fight, and I am always in favor of getting others to do
    the heavy lifting when we cannot do it or we should not be
    doing it. So they are definitely partners.
        As far as Wahhabism is concerned, this is just a very
    literalist interpretation of the faith, and it does come with
    money, but money is not enough to turn people to this version
    of the faith. I mean, I think that people turn to it because it
    responds to particular anxieties that modern people have--that
    modern Muslims have.
        So I think that just to blame Wahhabism for the rise of
    ISIS is wrong. But the Saudis would definitely be helpful in
    this regard.
        Senator Carper. We spend a fair amount of time on this
    Committee focusing on root causes, as opposed to symptoms of
    problems. I will use an example. Our border with Mexico, we
    spent about a quarter of a trillion dollars in the last 10
    years to fortify the border--walls, dirigibles, blimps, drones,
    and some 20,000 Border Patrol personnel. And that is all well
    and good, but we spent about one percent of that--not even one
    percent of that--addressing the root causes of emigration
    factors in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador and the misery
    that those people live in and how we have contributed to that
    misery.
        The Chairman and I have been down--and some others on the
    Committee have been down--to actually visit those countries. I
    was down and met with the Presidents, all three of them, just
    last week and did see how they are doing. They swore in a new
    President in Guatemala.
        But we actually go to the source and say, ``What are you
    willing to do to turn around your countries? And what do we
    need to do?'' Because we are complicit in your misery, given
    our addiction to the drugs that travel through their countries.
        If we had the ability to ask--I believe in asking your
    customer--our Chairman comes out of the business community. You
    always want to ask your customer. In this case, if we are
    asking those that are being drawn to ISIS--whether the folks
    have actually gone to fight militarily or to set up these
    satellite operations--to ask them as our customer, ``Why you
    are doing this?'' and to better understand how to counter it,
    what would they likely say? Hedieh, would you lead that off,
    please? Ms. Mirahmadi, what would they say? Just very briefly.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Well, I mean, to tell you the truth, I have
    tried to study this scientifically, so we tried to apply
    evaluation tools to determine what those root causes are, and I
    do not think that you can point to any one root cause. So I
    think that people have claimed that it is poverty, but we have
    debunked that theory because it cannot be just poverty because
    a lot of poor people do not become terrorists.
        People say that it is social alienation, or it is
    disenfranchisement in Western countries, or it is ideology. I
    think that we have come to the conclusion that it is a range of
    risk factors that overlap and can cause a variety of responses.
    There is no single factor that has been proven to cause
    terrorism or proven as a root cause.
        Senator Carper. OK.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. So it is a lot of things, and it is
    everything at once.
        Senator Carper. OK. Thank you. Mr. Vidino.
        Mr. Vidino. Unfortunately, I have to be as equally vague as
    Hedieh because the reality is that it is such a diverse--if we
    just look at the sample in the United States, the 80
    individuals who have been arrested for ISIS-related activities,
    the diversity is staggering, the profiles: 40 percent converts,
    different levels of knowledge of Islam, for example. We have
    people who convert literally on Google and overnight think they
    know everything about Islam and they think that it is their
    religious duty to go and join ISIS. But you also have people
    who have grown up in the faith, actually they are Hafiz, who
    have memorized the Koran, they are teachers themselves in
    Islamic schools in the States, and then try to join ISIS. So
    there is absolutely no one answer.
        The psychological profile of a lot of them is that they
    feel the need to help. It is obviously misguided, but there is,
    I think, a lot of evidence that they are people with a high
    sense of empathy, of compassion, and they feel that they are
    doing something good or that they are helping.
        Senator Carper. Thank you.
        Dr. Stern, you ask this question of a lot of people. ``Why
    do you do this?''
        Ms. Stern. Yes, I agree with my colleagues that there
    absolutely is no single root cause, no typical pathway. But we
    do know that the lone wolves--I mean, this is one thing that
    actually has come out of the literature. Lone wolves are much
    more likely to have mental illness. This is the thing we are
    most worried about now, lone wolves, here in the United States,
    not what we are worried about over there.
        We are finding in a study that I have been involved with at
    Children's Hospital in Boston that a lot of time on the
    Internet is a risk factor. But there are so many risk factors.
    Obviously, I spend a lot of time on the Internet doing my
    research, and it is not a risk factor for me to join ISIS.
        I think that we are not going to get very far in
    identifying exactly what the risk factors are, but that we can
    use what we learn about each individual who is thinking about
    it and who is sitting on the fence. How do we stop that person
    from joining? We need to understand each individual. And I feel
    very strongly about the efforts to talk to these kids one on
    one online before they join, and also to deploy formers, people
    who have actually joined and recognized that it is not a heroic
    existence and that joining ISIS was nothing like what they had
    imagined.
        There are hundreds of clerics all over the world, learned
    scholars, who have said, ``Well, this is not Islam''--that is
    not quite true. It is based on Islam. But, ``This is not the
    Islam that we believe in.'' They are boring. We need people who
    can communicate with these kids who find the idea of ISIS
    appealing.
        So we need to understand, with each individual, why they
    are drawn and to address that.
        Senator Carper. Thank you. My time is up. Let me just close
    with this thought. In an earlier existence, as a Governor, I
    was a founding Vice Chairman of something called the ``American
    Legacy Foundation,'' created out of the tobacco settlement, 50
    States and the tobacco industry, a lot of money flowed out of
    that to the States to offset the health care costs that States
    were incurring because of tobacco. One of the things that came
    out of it was $1 billion or more to set up a foundation called
    the ``American Legacy Foundation.'' The responsibility of the
    foundation was to create a truth campaign to convince young
    people who were thinking of smoking not to and young people who
    were already smoking to stop. And the message was developed not
    by us, but actually by young people, sort of like you are
    suggesting, and they worked with public relations folks who
    were really good at messaging and did a multimedia campaign.
    And if you think it might have worked, look at the rates of
    teen smoking from about 2001 until the end of that decade.
    Remarkable. But the key was, as you suggest, to go to other
    young people and let them help develop the message--this is why
    smoking is bad for you. This is why you do not want to do it--
    and to be able to use that source of delivery to convey the
    message. And maybe that is part of what we need to do here.
        There is an entity within the Department of Homeland
    Security--it is called the ``Office of Community
    Partnerships''--which is designed, in part, to do that work,
    and we are trying to help connect them with the people in the
    American Legacy Foundation, who have done this truth campaign
    successfully and see if maybe this is a way to do it to address
    an even graver threat than tobacco.
        Thank you.
        Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Carper. Senator
    Peters.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PETERS

        Senator Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to
    our panelists for what I think is very interesting testimony,
    and on something that is so important so that we get a better
    understanding of what we are dealing with from an ideological
    standpoint, from a messaging standpoint, and from the general
    narrative that we are hearing from ISIS as they are recruiting
    folks and moving forward with their terrorist activities.
        I think that it is important to bring this hearing to what
    is happening actually later today on the Senate floor. We are
    going to be dealing with an issue related to refugees.
    Certainly right now, we are dealing with a humanitarian crisis
    that we have not seen since the Second World War. We have folks
    who are fleeing ISIS. Dr. Haykel, I think that you mentioned
    that folks would not want to live under ISIS rule. We have
    people who have been persecuted, who live in fear, who live in
    terror, and who are fleeing that part of the world as fast as
    they can, both Syria and Iraq, looking for a safe haven.
        The United States, in my view, should welcome folks as
    refugees, those who are legitimate refugees, as part of our
    commitment to the world community. Yet there are people who are
    saying, ``No, we should shut down the refugee program, we
    should not accept any refugees in this country.''
        I would like to hear from each of the panelists. To what
    extent does the fact that there are certain folks in the United
    States who believe that we should shut down a refugee program
    that accepts people who are fleeing the terror and fleeing
    ISIS, play into ISIS's narrative? Or is that a good thing for
    us to be doing? Let us start with Dr. Haykel.
        Mr. Haykel. So the refugee crisis in the Middle East is
    largely the result of the civil wars and the governments
    themselves not keeping the State together. In the case of
    Syria, for instance, the refugees are largely produced by the
    Assad regime, a regime that is backed by both Russia and Iran.
    ISIS does not actually allow the people it rules over to leave
    the territory.
        The way in which the refugee issue plays out--and the only
    way that I have seen it was, most recently, in the way that Mr.
    Trump mentioned that Muslims should not be allowed into this
    country. That plays into the ISIS narrative because it
    basically confirms that the United States is an enemy of Islam.
    But more broadly, I do not think that ISIS is focused on the
    debate over refugees, in general.
        Senator Peters. Well, we heard from a previous panel, and
    folks were saying that refugees are somewhat of an
    embarrassment to ISIS because their narrative is that people
    should welcome the caliphate and people should want to come. So
    why does everyone want to leave the area and not come into
    their protective sphere, I should say?
        Mr. Haykel. Right, you are correct. ISIS calls for Muslims
    to give their oath of allegiance to the caliphate and then to
    come to the territory. Most of the people, though, who have
    left that region have left actually--for instance, Christians
    are a large percentage of the people who are leaving because
    they are persecuted, both by ISIS and other Islamists there;
    also moderates, liberals, all kinds of people who have left
    actually are people who would not fit into an ISIS-like world
    or a world in which Islamism dominates, whether it is ISIS or--
    many of the other groups, for instance, in Syria are all
    Islamists. Most of the opposition is Islamist and intolerant of
    difference.
        But you are right. I think that those who have left ISIS
    territory and who describe what life is like under ISIS are
    extremely important in the propaganda war against ISIS because
    they come out and they describe it as a ``living hell.''
        Senator Peters. Any other panelists?
        Ms. Stern. I would say that I agree with you that we must
    accept refugees. I think that we must thoroughly investigate
    them. I think that we must recognize that ISIS will try to
    insert operatives into that refugee flow. I think that those
    are facts.
        At the same time, if we do not accept the refugees, that
    harms our position in the long run even more. It is not just
    ISIS, as my colleagues keep saying. This is an ideology. We can
    defeat ISIS. There will be another iteration of this jihadist
    ideology.
        Senator Peters. Dr. Vidino?
        Mr. Vidino. I agree. If we look, for example, at the
    numbers of individuals who were arrested in the U.S., only
    really a handful have a refugee background. We basically had
    two cases of people, very simply, one in Texas and one in
    California, with a refugee background out of people arrested
    for ISIS-related activities. There were a couple of other
    individuals of Bosnian and Somali backgrounds who have a
    refugee background, but their radicalization took place here in
    the States well after receiving asylum.
        I agree that it is, to some degree, an opportunity, but we
    are missing--if we are welcoming people, we should be telling
    these stories. They are an asset in undermining the ISIS
    narrative. I am not seeing that kind of message being put out
    in a good way, stories being told in the right way, being put
    on social media, whether in Arabic, whether in English and
    other languages, of people saying, ``I left ISIS because of
    this and this and that, and I am now here, and I am being
    treated humanely and everything.'' We are doing something nice.
    We are not then using that opportunity.
        Senator Peters. OK.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. I think that there is a corollary issue
    about the refugees as well, in that we have to make sure that
    we are providing the requisite services for them to adapt to
    life in the United States. We actually have a lot of clients
    who are refugees, and a lot of them are having a real difficult
    time adjusting to life in the United States because they do not
    speak the language, and they have suffered from years of post
    traumatic stress disorder from war and from losing family
    members. And so it is really important that the refugee
    resettlement services are doing their job and also referring
    them for psychiatric services or other kinds of therapeutic
    needs that they may have to make sure that when they do come
    here, they are acclimating and integrating into society and not
    leading to further problems down the road.
        Senator Peters. So, if I could summarize, you believe that
    the refugee program is an important aspect of U.S. policy, that
    it speaks to our values as Americans, and that we do welcome
    folks who are fleeing persecution and violence. Certainly, we
    have to make sure that we are screening those refugees and that
    we have a process to protect the homeland, which I believe very
    strongly in, that we have a very vigorous screening process.
    But, nevertheless, refugee program provides a very important
    element in pushing back against this extremism, not just with
    ISIS, but just generally. In fact, as all of you have said,
    defeating ISIS by itself is important, but that is not the end.
    There is still much more that we have to do, and having a
    credible, workable, and secure refugee program in the United
    States, and then using the stories that these refugees can tell
    us about what they are fleeing and why American values are so
    important, will be important to our effort. Is that accurate?
    Does anybody disagree?
        [No response.]
        Let the record reflect that no one disagrees with that.
    Thank you so much.
        Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Peters.
        Let me just quickly repeat what I have said, which is that
    if we are going to accept, let us say, 10,000 refugees, which
    is just a pittance in terms of the numbers of refugees, why do
    we not establish criteria, allow women and children who have
    been properly vetted and who are relatives of Syrian American
    citizens who can financially support them? I mean, would that
    not make sense? So, hopefully, the administration would take
    that type of advice, and I do not think that we would have much
    of an issue here. Senator Portman.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PORTMAN

        Senator Portman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As tempting as it
    is to get into the refugee issue, I am going to try to stay
    away from it, except to say one thing. We have had testimony in
    this very hearing room. Seated right where you are, Dr. Stern,
    in fact, was the Director of the Federal Bureau of
    Investigations (FBI), who told us that there were gaps in
    intelligence that did not allow them to properly vet these
    refugees. And, of course, we should be helping the refugees,
    and as the Chairman has said, bringing 10,000 in, out of the
    roughly 4 million who have fled Syria, is a small drop in the
    bucket. A much larger role that the United States plays is
    supporting these refugees as they are trying to reestablish
    their lives in these refugee camps, and we should and can play
    a huge role there, and we do. American tax dollars are used.
    But we do need to protect the homeland as well, and I guess
    that is where my questioning would be.
        I do not disagree with the comments about taking on ISIS in
    the current caliphate that they are developing in Syria and
    Iraq. I think that we need to be more aggressive militarily,
    and I do think, to Professor Haykel's comments, that a military
    victory is an important victory, outside of the military
    aspect, because it shows that they are not invulnerable. It
    shows that they, in fact, can be defeated.
        I also believe that we have to protect the homeland in more
    effective ways, including better screening, and not just for
    refugees. That is, of course, a very small part of the people
    who come here. The visa programs, obviously we had this issue
    arise in San Bernardino, where a spousal visa was used to gain
    entry for one of the terrorists, and we did not do the proper
    vetting, including looking at her social media, which would
    have been the obvious thing to do. And, of course, people
    coming across our borders illegally, so protecting the homeland
    is critical.
        But to me, the most difficult part of this and the most
    important part, which is why this hearing is so important--and
    I thank the Chair and Ranking Member for holding it, and I
    thank our
    witnesses who have provided us with a lot of very valuable
    information--is dealing with the core issue. Some call it the
    ``hearts and minds.'' I do not know if that is an appropriate
    way to describe it, but, essentially, how to keep this
    extremism from growing. And the jihadists who have converged in
    Syria come from all over the world, and we know that.
        We also know that attacks are occurring all over the world.
    We have a New York Times story from December. Some of you know
    this. I counted up the number of deaths from terrorism. This is
    not from military actions by ISIS. This is really from
    terrorism. It is over 1,500 people who have been killed in the
    last year through terrorist attacks, including some we know a
    lot about, like Paris and San Bernardino, and others we just do
    not talk about much. So how do we get at changing the hearts
    and minds?
        Professor Haykel, you talked about our first and best line
    of defense being the Muslim community. I could not agree with
    you more, and I think we do not spend enough time and effort on
    that. I was riding with police officers in Columbus, Ohio over
    the weekend, in the communities in Columbus that are Muslim
    communities, particularly the Somali community there. How do we
    encourage better communication and cooperation to the point
    that we heard earlier from Dr. Mirahmadi about separation
    versus, I would say, inclusion or social alienation versus, I
    would say, community involvement? How do you get that
    interaction? I think that is incredibly important, and we are
    not doing enough there, and it is about domestic terrorism and
    the fact that we do have, even with success overseas, a problem
    right here at home.
        Dr. Vidino talked about this interest of living in a
    utopian Islamic society. We need to have the counternarrative
    to that, obviously, much more effectively online and elsewhere.
    You talked about the core of the message being more important
    than the medium. In other words, we can complain about the fact
    that we do not do an effective job to counter it online, which
    I believe we do not, but also we have to get at the core
    message as well.
        And then Dr. Stern had a number of interesting comments.
    One that I thought was the most interesting was that we can
    defeat ISIS, it will just crop up elsewhere, essentially that
    was what you were saying. And it is almost like Whac-A-Mole. If
    we are successful in Syria--I look at, again, this New York
    Times story and the analysis that we have done. There are at
    least ten other countries where ISIS now has a presence, a huge
    one in Libya, for instance. And even beyond ISIS, of course,
    other groups will emerge because of the core. And then we also
    have the example from Dr. Mirahmadi, as an expert, saying we
    are not going to bomb our way out of this problem and talking
    about other ways to deal with it.
        So that is what I want to get at, if I could just get more
    ideas from you all. What should we be doing? You mentioned
    Egypt. There are also other Sunni countries that should be
    playing a more aggressive role in, as you say, exporting not
    Salafi jihadi Islam, but traditional Islam. What more can be
    done there? You mentioned, Dr. Stern, deploying former
    jihadists, using clerics more, and the counter narrative that
    we talked about. If each of you could give me a couple of
    examples of what we should be doing to address this third, and
    I think most difficult, problem that we face of how to get at
    the core and how we change those hearts and minds. Let us start
    with Dr. Mirahmadi and go to our right.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. So in addition to the things that we could
    do with Egypt, Morocco, and Indonesia--when I talk about
    helping them export, I meant materials, curriculum, books, and
    Imam training programs. So basically what the Wahhabis--what
    the Salafists did--was they exported such material, through
    this mechanism of taking over small centers, creating new
    centers of learning, starting at a very young age, and then
    establishing an Imam in these centers that would then basically
    change the ideology of the community around them. So we need to
    do the reverse. We need these countries to train Imams, create
    curriculums, and start creating that kind of groundswell around
    traditional pluralistic concepts of Islam. And I am not talking
    about making it up on the fly. This is part of 1,200 years of
    Islamic history that they can use.
        Senator Portman. We should use our leverage, the United
    States' diplomatic leverage----
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Diplomatic, exactly.
        Senator Portman [continuing]. Economic leverage, whatever
    leverage we have. That is an urgent need.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Absolutely. And we are doing it. I know that
    our cooperation with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), hosting
    conferences, for example, Sheikh Bin Bayya is also doing a
    number of events that are cosponsored by the United States. So
    I know that we are doing it. For example, Al-Azhar University
    and its network has 400,000 students at any one time--400,000
    people. So that is a lot of people that could influence the way
    the ideological religious dynamic plays out in the next 5 to 10
    years.
        Senator Portman. Dr. Vidino.
        Mr. Vidino. Yes, generally speaking, I think that the
    United States has been somewhat reluctant to get into the
    religious debate, for obvious reasons: separation of church and
    State, and because it is a religion that we are not very
    familiar with. And I think that reluctance, to some degree, has
    to go, although we do not have to do it directly, but I think
    there needs to be more support for the right people--whether it
    is governments or, even better, civil society organizations
    abroad, and domestically, to work on the religious aspect of
    it. It is not purely a religious problem, clearly, we all
    agree, but there is a big religious component there.
        I said that maybe we sometimes overestimate the online
    aspect. Now I am going to reverse what I said. I think a lot of
    the message is out there. You mentioned Morocco, Jordan, and
    the UAE. A lot of these countries do put out a lot of very good
    products, very good reinterpretations of Islamic texts that
    undermine ISIS's interpretations. But they are not slick, they
    are not cool--they need to be marketed in the right way. You go
    to these conferences, and you have a lot of people with a lot
    of gray hair. You do not get to the right people. And often you
    reach those right people through social media. So it is a
    matter of repackaging, and I think that is a goal, to have a
    lot of--I do not know if there are a lot of debates, but
    conversations between the White House and Google and Facebook
    and so on. And I think that is one other aspect where we should
    have that conversation, how to repackage----
        Senator Portman. My time is expiring. I want to be
    considerate of our other colleagues here, so I would like for
    the record if you all, Dr. Haykel and Dr. Stern, would provide
    me with specific examples, in addition to any more that Dr.
    Vidino and Dr. Mirahmadi have.
        But one final question. The Office of Community Partnership
    has come before us from the Department of Homeland Security.
    Are they doing what you just said? Yes or no. Not so much.
        Mr. Vidino. Not so much.
        Senator Portman. OK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Portman. Senator
    Heitkamp.

                 OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HEITKAMP

        Senator Heitkamp. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to get to
    a story that was just released in the last probably 20 hours,
    which is that ISIS is cutting the salaries of their fighters in
    half. And I think that it was unclear how they were dealing
    with food stipends. I think they thought that the food stipends
    were fairly consistent, but not the stipends for children and
    for wives. And that has to be an indicator of some of the
    challenges that they are experiencing right now, and I want
    your reaction to kind of the financial aspects of this, how we
    can do a better job to cripple this organization from a
    financial standpoint. I think $26 oil is having a pretty
    dramatic effect. But beyond that, what does this reduction in
    salaries and assets mean for this organization, for this
    terrorist organization? And how can we further flame the
    financial challenges of ISIS? I would like everyone's
    reactions.
        Mr. Haykel. So I am of the view that ISIS is actually
    losing and has been actually for quite a few months now, not
    only territory, but also financially.
        One of the ways in which that can be furthered financially
    is to have better control over private financial flows out of
    the Persian Gulf, and here I am specifically talking about the
    countries of Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.
        Senator Heitkamp. And I just will interrupt and say that we
    recently were on a trip to the Mideast, and this is exactly
    supported by what we heard there.
        Mr. Haykel. Yes, and they are definitely trying to do this.
    The problem is that many of the payments take the form of cash
    bags that are carried across the border. So getting the Turks
    on board--because that is often where the cash is carried
    through--is extremely important.
        But I think that would be very important, and then the way
    in which we are using special forces, in particular with the
    Kurds, is, I think, a model that should be replicated with
    other fighting groups on the ground. That is proving extremely
    effective as well.
        Senator Heitkamp. OK. Dr. Stern.
        Ms. Stern. I guess one question I would want to ask is: Are
    they cutting the salaries of propagandists? We know from a
    really good story in the Washington Post, that the
    propagandists are actually paid more than the fighters.
        Senator Heitkamp. There is an indication that it is across
    the board, that all salaries are being reduced, not just
    fighters' salaries. But, again, this is based on intel that we
    are receiving, that is being reported.
        Ms. Stern. Yes. So this is a very good sign. Stopping the
    sale of oil from ISIS to inside Syria, that is obviously pretty
    hard to accomplish. Also, they make money from so many
    different operations. They are selling amphetamines such as
    Captagon. They are managing to get those antiquities out. So
    this has to be a major effort to stop both the flow of foreign
    fighters in and the flow of goods out. I mean, I do not know
    what else to say. It is great. If this is happening, it is
    great.
        Mr. Vidino. I agree with everything that has been said, and
    I think that the emphasis on Turkey is there. It is all really
    about Turkey. Yes, the Gulf States in terms of private
    donations are very difficult, but probably the crucial role
    there is to be played by Turkey.
        I think what concerns me also, to some degree, is how many
    places ISIS has expanded to. Libya, it is probably also, from a
    financial point of view, particularly concerning because ISIS
    is starting to control parts of Libya, and this is also very
    crucial from an oil point of view and from an immigration point
    of view. It is sort of the end of a route that starts in Sub-
    Saharan Africa, where all sorts of goods and refugees are
    imported to Libya, and it is a gateway to Europe.
        So there is a reason why ISIS is focusing on that part of
    Libya specifically, and why it is even telling its fighters not
    to go to Syria and Iraq any longer, but actually to shift to
    Libya. It is obviously because there is a political vacuum
    there. It is an opportunity. But it is a big financial
    opportunity as well.
        Senator Heitkamp. OK.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. I think that for some of the cases that we
    have seen here in the United States, financial incentives are
    important. So them learning about a reduction in financial
    incentives would hopefully reduce incentives to go. We had one
    case in particular, Mona Abu Salah, who talked about how he had
    food in his truck all of the time and that it was so great to
    have these resources in the caliphate. So I think that it is a
    very important issue.
        And what tools we have mentioned already: the Department of
    the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), all of
    their financial control systems, designating more individuals
    to stop the flow of money, and reducing the price of oil.
    Anything we could do to cutoff their ability to provide
    financial incentives is important.
        Senator Heitkamp. I know that earlier we had this
    conversation about what are, in fact, the root causes, and I
    think that we could all argue that feeding someone's family and
    providing a salary in a war-torn area may, in fact, be a great
    incentive beyond the ideology and beyond the broader mission.
    And one of the things that has arisen in this discussion is,
    never mind the migration of refugees to this country, but once
    they are here, the need to provide social services so that we
    do not see radicalization. We could vet folks all we wanted,
    but once they come here, if they are alienated, if they feel
    isolated, and if they feel separated from the communities that
    they are living in, then that is another risk factor.
        And so I want you, I guess, Doctor, to expand. I thought it
    was an important point that I want to reemphasize here because
    I do not think that anyone here is talking about eliminating
    refugees. What we are talking about is vetting them
    appropriately on the front end, but you raise a very important
    point, which is that there are risk factors if we do not manage
    the refugee population, if we do not assist the refugee
    population once they are here.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Absolutely. I mean, Lorenzo mentioned the
    fact that refugees were not radicalized before they came and
    the small number of cases. I mean, a case in point is
    Minnesota. So when you have a large resettlement effort----
        Senator Heitkamp. You are talking about the Somalis.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Yes. The resettlement agencies tend to focus
    on particular communities and continue to put refugees in a
    single place, thinking that they are creating a circle of
    resources. But the problem is it also can ghettoize communities
    and not allow them to adjust and to integrate. So it is very
    important that there are social services provided and that
    there are also community service opportunities and other kinds
    of community-based programs that will help them to integrate in
    mainstream society, such as English language training and all
    sorts of job, vocational training, to make sure that once we do
    welcome refugees, which is a very important part of our
    society, that they do become productive, healthy, and
    integrated American citizens.
        Senator Heitkamp. Yes. I just wanted to reemphasize that
    point because I think that, as we are rightfully focused on
    what is the appropriate vetting process, we still have these
    challenges moving forward. And if we as a country do not have a
    more unified message, we risk our national security in not
    managing the refugee population that we have.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Absolutely.
        Senator Heitkamp. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Heitkamp. Senator
    Booker.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR BOOKER

        Senator Booker. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank
    you, Ranking Member.
        I just want to say at the outset how much I appreciate you
    all being here, and your written testimony was really
    important. I am grateful for your presence here.
        I just want you to know that there are many tools to stop
    ISIS. I think that one of the first things we need to be doing
    as a country is to put forth an Authorization for Use of
    Military Force (AUMF) for this engagement. I think that it is
    actually an abdication of our authorities, as delineated by the
    Constitution, that we are engaging in such an important war
    without Congress at all doing its job and its constitutional
    duties. There are a lot of other things we need to do, from
    working with our allies, to making sure that we are
    coordinating efforts to destabilize and destroy ISIS. We need
    to craft a political solution, overall, to what is happen in
    Syria.
        I say all of this at the outset because I tend to be
    focused a lot on the issue of counter-ISIS messaging, and I
    want to say that that is just one tool in a toolbox. But it is
    one that I really do not believe we are doing that well.
        Ms. Stern, in your testimony you talked a lot, I think,
    about important information about the alienation and
    marginalization that can go on with young people--that they
    have had humiliating encounters with the police and that
    ignorance of Islam makes a youth more vulnerable to ISIS's
    ideologies. All of these things create an atmosphere with which
    people can be radicalized. And what I found interesting is an
    important point that I think needs to be understood. When it
    comes to those immediate threats in our Nation, you point
    specifically to the fact that it is the Western recruits that
    can so easily get back into this country, or never leave this
    country in the first place, who offer the most immediate
    threats to the safety and security of the United States of
    America. And so that is really where I want to drill down,
    because I am a little frustrated when it comes to our efforts
    at countermessaging.
        Now, you mentioned at the outset of your testimony, that
    our counter-ISIS strategy is lacking in our investment in
    counternarratives that appeal to specifically Millennial youth.
    To that end, you will be offering a Peer-2-Peer (P2P) course in
    your classroom next fall, which sounds like an interesting
    course. Perhaps you should hold it here in Washington. My staff
    has been involved in extensive conversations with Tony Sgro,
    the founder of the P2P program. So we are very focused on this,
    and I am working on legislation right now to give DHS the tools
    to widely implement the Peer-2-Peer course.
        So can you tell me, in your own words, what you believe are
    the benefits of the P2P program and why it is so critically
    needed?
        Ms. Stern. I think that we really have not taken this
    issue, as you say, seriously enough. If you think about what we
    did during the Cold War, when we realized that we had to fight
    the Soviet ideology, it involved the private sector and the
    government working together with covert and overt programs. We
    spent a lot of money. It led to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
    (RFE/RL). It led to Voice of America. We are not taking this
    nearly as seriously as we did----
        Senator Booker. And, by the way, we still spend an
    extraordinary amount of money on those programs of the Cold War
    era.
        Ms. Stern. Right, because they are effective.
        Senator Booker. Well, I would question whether they were
    effective--and thank you very much--and we are spending
    hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money
    on things like Voice of America and not on the programs that
    you have such a specialty in.
        Ms. Stern. Right. So Tony Sgro's course--it is amazing.
    This is a guy who had found a way to help Honda design cars--
    the car that a 19-year-old kid would want to buy, by having the
    youth get involved in the design of the car. Why not get youth
    involved in writing that counternarrative instead of a bunch of
    middle-aged people in the State Department or----
        Senator Booker. With no disrespect to middle-aged people.
    [Laughter.]
        Ms. Stern. Right. The program is now--it is in 30
    countries. I have just spoken with a university in Bosnia where
    it is very important because of the spread of ISIS there. The
    kids get to develop their counternarrative. Hopefully they find
    some hip-hop artist who had joined ISIS and quit. They know
    what is attractive to young people. I think it is really
    important that this be offered not just in universities, but
    also in high schools. And as it happens, the Saudis are now
    going to try to offer this program in high schools. I would
    like to see that happen all over the world. I think it is so
    inexpensive compared with the money we spend on the military
    aspect of fighting ISIS. We can afford to experiment and see
    what works. So I am a big proponent of EdVentures and Peer-2-
    Peer----
        Senator Booker. And I appreciate that, and just to
    highlight the urgency here--and I really want to turn to
    Professor Haykel, not only because I want to hear your
    testimony, but because you are from New Jersey and I should
    highlight you, sir. [Laughter.]
        But, look, one of the factors in your explanation of the
    multifaceted appeal of the Islamic State is the massive youth
    bulge. We are talking about a boom of Millennials within this
    region. Sixty percent of the population across the Arab world
    is under the age of 30. Think about that. Seventy-five percent
    of the population in Mali, for example--excuse me. The median
    age is 15.9. In Tunisia, youth unemployment among graduates is
    around thirty percent. So you have, in all of these countries,
    massive youth populations, and youth are making up the majority
    of the population in these countries where we are currently
    facing ISIS or its affiliates. How should this demographic
    reality, of these Millennials, as we were just talking about,
    really affect the way that we think about Syria, Iraq, and even
    Turkey and other countries in the region, to tune our strategy
    in terms of countermessaging?
        Mr. Haykel. Thank you. I have been involved in seeing how
    ISIS recruits the Millennials. So, for instance, ISIS has
    created its own version of Grand Theft Auto, the video game.
    ISIS goes into where these young people are involved in
    discussions online and then lures them with its own version of
    these video games. So they are very sophisticated in basically
    using our culture, things that we have produced, and then
    distorting them for their purposes. So it is very important, I
    think, to focus on this.
        And the other point is that these Millennials that you are
    talking about are actually, today, extremely connected through
    the Internet to the world, largely because in many countries of
    the Middle East, there is no other way to communicate and there
    is no other way to have a discussion, an open discussion.
        So I think that one has to think about these young people,
    and especially the cultural products of the United States and
    how they are being contorted and distorted to attract these
    young people to extremism and radicalism.
        Senator Booker. Thank you. So, in other words, we have a
    region of the globe that is a Millennial region, and we need to
    attune sort of the Baby Boomer and Gen X efforts to really
    focus in on language that they understand and that they are
    engaging in.
        Mr. Haykel. That is absolutely correct.
        Senator Booker. Thank you, sir.
        Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Booker.
        Just because you brought up AUMF--I am on the Senate
    Foreign Relations Committee--let me give you my insight on
    that. I would say that as soon as this administration were to
    present and we were to have Democratic support for an
    Authorization for Use of Military Force that shows the full
    commitment of this Nation and this administration to accomplish
    the goal of defeating ISIS--it does not limit this
    administration, or the successor administration, in any way,
    shape, or form. You have that authorization, but we have not
    seen that yet. That is why we do not have one. Senator Ernst.

                   OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR ERNST

        Senator Ernst. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to
    our witnesses today. It is very good to have this discussion,
    very relevant with everything that we have going on today.
        Dr. Vidino, if I could start with you, please, in December
    your organization published a report, which I think was very
    well titled, ``ISIS in America: From Retweets to Raqqa.'' And
    one of the report's conclusions suggests that intervention is
    an effective alternative to arrest--and I would like to hear a
    little bit more about that--to really help sway some of those
    individuals from the path of radicalization. So you do note a
    potential number of issues with this intervention, including
    the lack of legal guidance and a set of best practices. So if
    you could expound a little bit on that, please, I would love to
    hear more about that.
        Mr. Vidino. Of course. Thank you very much for your
    question. What we advocate is a system--I think that we all
    understand, as we said earlier on the panel, that we cannot
    arrest our way out of this problem. And the FBI were the first
    ones to say this, that the numbers are too big. And I think in
    many cases, you have people who are minors or people anyways
    who have not crossed a certain threshold. So I think there
    should be at least the choice--the authorities should have the
    ability to, in some cases, of course, monitor, investigate,
    arrest, and go the hard traditional way, but there should be,
    in certain cases, an ability to have a system in place where
    some kind of mentoring, some kind of intervention is carried
    out.
        Of course, there are different ways of doing this. You have
    a lot of European countries that have been experimenting with
    this with mixed results, but I think that they have gotten much
    better over the last 3 or 4 years in how to do that, whether it
    is law enforcement directly that does it or, as I would
    personally advocate, the lighter the footprint of government,
    the better, so it is civil society that does that, of course,
    with some kind of guidelines that come from the government,
    some kind of clear legal guidelines aboout what can be done
    when the intervention transcends into criminal investigation
    and so on. But things need to be clarified from the beginning.
    It also has to be very clear in the message that is sent to the
    community, because there has been a lot of controversy and a
    lot of pushback from some quarters in the Muslim community that
    Common Vulnerabilities and Exporsures (CVE) interventions are
    used as ways to spy on communities and so on. I think that it
    should be done in a very clear way, explaining that these are
    ways, not to criminalize people, but actually to help people
    not criminalize themselves. This is a way out for people,
    before they cross a certain line and do something that is
    criminally relevant, and also something that damages their own
    lives.
        So finding the right people, finding the right partners,
    whether it is an Imam, people from a religious background, or
    in some cases they do not have to be, but people that can find
    a way to gain the trust of these young people who are
    radicalizing and sway them. And, of course, it is not easy. It
    does not work all of the time. But the European experience
    tells us that it works--for example, in the U.K., they talk
    about a sixty to seventy percent success rate. That is huge.
    That takes away a big, big chunk of work from what the FBI has
    to do. Their resources are spread thin. If we eliminate sixty
    to seventy percent of people who are potentially dangerous, but
    just starting to flirt with the ideology, and we sway them, not
    only are we doing something good for these individuals, first
    of all, but we are also really helping law enforcement to
    focus, to zero in on the really bad guys.
        So it needs to be done in the right way, and I think there
    should be some kind of legislative intervention there in
    setting how the rules of the game should be. And, of course,
    there should be participation with the law enforcement
    community in that, and then getting communities involved.
        Senator Ernst. Do you think that we would have good
    participation from non-governmental agencies here in the United
    States, organizations that would step forward and be able to
    fill that role? And, Ms. Mirahmadi, I would love to hear your
    take on that as well, please.
        Mr. Vidino. Yes, I think, first of all, one should have
    civil society involved in general, and I think Hedieh can give
    a practical example of how that is done. But I think that the
    local level is also crucial when it comes to government. I
    think that it has to be done at the county level and at the
    State level. These are the people who, more than the FBI,
    really have the pulse of the community. And to some degree,
    they are seen not as the bad guys, as the FBI would be.
    Obviously, there is a role for the FBI for sure there, but I
    think that it is local law enforcement, health departments, and
    a variety of entities at the local level that are cricial in
    getting the communities to be involved.
        I think that we have seen a bit of pushback from
    communities, but I think that it comes from some self-appointed
    leaders of the community. So there are big parts of the
    community that do want to help, do want to work with
    government, because they understand that the problem is
    targeting their own children. So one has to be really clear
    about how diverse the community is and who they will find as
    partners.
        Senator Ernst. OK. Ms. Mirahmadi, if you would, please.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. I absolutely agree with what Lorenzo
    mentioned in terms of legal guidelines. So we do run one of the
    first intervention/prevention programs on violent extremism in
    the country, and it is difficult, risky, and complicated, but
    that does not mean that we cannot navigate our way through it.
    We are able to operate completely outside of the purview of law
    enforcement until there is an imminent threat or some national
    security risk. So there is a way to develop a program that
    protects client health information, and then when it goes to a
    case of radicalization, or when the FBI or the police
    department would want to refer a case, you could follow the
    rules of informed consent and balance those interests with our
    national security concerns.
        And I would just like to say that as long as the FBI
    continues to have jurisdiction on those cases, as unpopular as
    it may be to some people, they need to be part of that process,
    because, at the end of the road, they will be involved if those
    cases go south. So it is important to have a balance between
    the community being able to stay within its purview and protect
    the client information and then still have a relationship with
    the Bureau when it is something beyond their control.
        Senator Ernst. OK. Is this reflective of what the Europeans
    have done? What are the greatest takeaways that we can learn
    from what their governments have done?
        Ms. Mirahmadi. As Lorenzo mentioned, there are many
    different kinds of models. So in Europe, a lot of them are led
    by government channels in the U.K. In my opinion, you should do
    both. We can have community-led programs and rectify
    inconsistencies in the process. In other words, if you do not
    follow a systematic approach, some dangerous people may be
    missed. For some, there is this hesitation to deal with law
    enforcement too closely so that they can do only prevention
    work.
        So I think that you can set up diversion programs, like we
    do in a lot of other violence prevention programs, that are in
    partnership
    with law enforcement. And then separately you could have
    prevention/intervention programs that are largely community
    run.
        Senator Ernst. OK, great. Wonderful. Well, I thank you very
    much for your input. It is something that we really do need to
    tackle.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Ernst. Senator Ayotte.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR AYOTTE

        Senator Ayotte. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        I wanted to follow up on your report, Dr. Vidino, and ask
    you about the aspect of it where you noted that there is a
    largely untapped opportunity to leverage American ISIS recruits
    that have become disillusioned with the cause, and that these
    individuals have dropped out for a variety of reasons, whether
    experiencing the brutality of life under ISIS firsthand or
    finding a more positive outlet for the quest that led them to
    ISIS in the first place. You noted that we would do well to
    provide avenues for their stories to be amplified to help
    dissuade would-be recruits.
        Could you explain that to us and just let us know, first of
    all, how many Americans do you think that would constitute? I
    am just curious. And, what are the reasons they have become
    disillusioned? And how could we use them to help us get at this
    issue?
        And then I am going to ask a dual question to all of you
    after that. How do we get the message out as to what life is
    like for women in ISIS? Because as I understand it, the way
    that they are portraying the role of women in how they are
    marketing it is quite different than the reality of being
    engaged with ISIS or obviously traveling to Iraq and Syria and
    joining up with the caliphate if you are a woman.
        So, Dr. Vidino, I am going to have you address the American
    issue, and then if people could jump in on women and how ISIS
    treats women, I would appreciate it.
        Mr. Vidino. OK. Thank you for your question, Senator. What
    we advocate--and, again, this is an idea that has been floating
    around in the Department of Justice (DOJ) and in other
    quarters--is the idea that, as we said earlier, there is a very
    powerful message that can be sent by people who are part of
    ISIS or, in general, the jihadist movement. I think that you
    are right that we are probably going to have some difficulties
    in finding a lot of Americans who have left ISIS. It is not
    really public information, but I would argue that there
    probably are some very isolated cases that you would find. We
    can definitely find more people who were al-Qaeda-linked, or
    anyway, jihadists. We have a whole wave of people who are
    coming out of prison now. These are the people who were sort of
    arrested post-9/11, sort of the second-tier guys, the people
    who did not go to fight, mostly the people who were convicted
    for material support and got between 10 and 15 years, and who
    are coming out of prison now.
        There is really no de-radicalization program in the U.S.
    prison system, but some of these people are coming out de-
    radicalized on their own, reformed. That is a very powerful
    message. We go back to--it is a message, but it is also the
    messenger. The legitimacy that somebody that has maybe served
    time in jail, maybe even went to Afghanistan or to Yemen, and
    can come back and say, ``Listen, the stories that we were fed
    are lies. The reality is completely different,'' that messenger
    is so much more powerful than the countless books the four of
    us can write here.
        So we argue that in some cases, whether it is people coming
    out of prison, whether it is people who, in one way or the
    other, are living in the States, or, even better in my opinion,
    if we have people coming back from ISIS--obviously if they have
    committed crimes, nobody argues that participation should be a
    way to get away with not being prosecuted and not being held
    responsible for what they did. But since we know that there are
    sort of borderline cases, with the proper considerations, I
    think that there is such a powerful countermessaging tool there
    that should be used. It is sort of a gutsy, alternative way of
    dealing with the problem, but I think that we do need new
    solutions and I think that this is an important one. Definitely
    we have some of those that come from the ``old guard,'' let us
    put it like that, the al-Qaeda people who were active 4 or 5
    years ago, and I think that is very powerful.
        Senator Ayotte. Who would like to go first in addressing
    how they are recruiting women, the reality versus--how we get
    that message out to women in particular?
        Ms. Mirahmadi. I think that as Lorenzo and Dr. Stern have
    both brought up, the issue of using formers could be a very
    powerful tool. But I would also like to posit that oftentimes a
    lot of
    these--the would-be recruits are very skeptical of messages
    that come from a former, because it is what they consider to be
    propaganda against the caliphate. So it would also be valuable
    to think of not only what we are against, but also what we
    actually stand for. So not just telling girls why they should
    not go, but also telling them why they should stay. And I think
    that it requires--whether it is a Muslim mentor or some other
    kind of social network that gives them a motivation for saying,
    ``I am Muslim, but I am also British or I am also American, and
    this is my country. I feel part of it and I have a faith that
    provides me with the spiritual and the intellectual needs that
    I have.'' I think that is a much more complicated question, but
    it is definitely something that we need to get to, because we
    need a positive message not just a countermessage.
        Senator Ayotte. Am I missing something? And maybe I am
    wrong about this, but I thought that they were misrepresenting
    to women what the reality was. And maybe I am wrong about that.
    I just would like to understand----
        Ms. Mirahmadi. No, what I mean is that they do not believe
    it when we say women are mistreated.
        Senator Ayotte. OK. I understand.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. So when we say, ``They treat you terribly.
    They make you wear a burqa. You do not ever get to go out. They
    do not feed you.'' Their response is, ``You are lying. You are
    making that up.''
        Senator Ayotte. Oh, they think that we are misrepresenting
    it.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Yes.
        Senator Ayotte. Professor.
        Ms. Stern. Here I think it is important to highlight the
    work of a woman, Humera Khan, who is working one-on-one with
    young people, and particularly young women, who believe this
    narrative. I think that this kind of work really needs to be
    supported. Of course they are lying. They are saying, ``You get
    to be a jihadi wife.'' They do not say, ``You get to be a
    jihadi wife one month with one guy and one month with the
    next--or maybe one day.''
        Yes, we need to get those stories out, but I think that the
    one-on-one approach that Humera Khan is involved in is very
    useful. That is what I will say.
        Mr. Haykel. The recruitment to ISIS provides meaning and
    structure to individuals. I do not think that it is gendered. I
    think that women are as attracted as men to the meaning and
    structure that ISIS provides when they are recruited. And ISIS,
    itself, is extremely adept in its propaganda and using women in
    its propaganda. So you see this in their online magazines, but
    also, for instance, one of their principal ideologues today,
    one of their principal thinkers who is writing poetry and
    treatises on Islam, is a woman. Her name is Ahlam al-Nasr. And
    they have a brigade of female morality police that roams the
    streets.
        So, the way that they present themselves to the outside
    world and to potential recruits is that this is a terrific
    place and women can lead meaningful lives and also produce the
    next generation of fighters, which is a duty for Islam as a
    religion, and for the caliphate itself.
        Unfortunately, the testimony of former slaves--so I am here
    thinking about someone called Nadia Murad, who is an amazing
    woman, a Yazidi who was enslaved and testified at the United
    Nations (U.N.) and also has given many interviews. If you
    listen to her, I mean, tears well up in your eyes. But it has
    had almost no effect, as far as I can tell, throughout the Arab
    world, because she is ``othered.'' She is seen as something
    outside of the community, and sometimes she is not even
    believed. They think that this is disinformation against the
    caliphate.
        Senator Ayotte. Thank you.
        Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Ayotte.
        Let me quickly pick up on that point because it ties in--I
    have three questions left. Dr. Mirahmadi, you talked about the
    need for basically a reverse Wahhabism process or project. They
    are not believing--I have met with young Yazidi women as well,
    and you are right, the treatment of them is horrific. How far
    along in that reverse process are we? I think I know, but I
    want to hear it from you.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Not very far along.
        Chairman Johnson. We are a long ways.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. We are long ways, but I think that it is to
    the point that Dr. Stern mentioned about not really believing
    what our problem is. We are just kind of throwing a lot of
    things at it and being, like, well, if we just do this, then it
    will go away, if we just do that, then it will go away. I have
    been doing this for 20 years. It is not going away.
        Chairman Johnson. No. This is a long-term process.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Yes.
        Chairman Johnson. It is a tough, long slog.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Right, exactly. And, also, we have to get
    over the issue of our trepidation in dealing with religion. So
    once we can overcome these two aspects and really confront what
    we are up against and then not be afraid of invoking religion
    when it could be helpful to our mutual causes, Muslim and non-
    Muslim, a whole lot of other tools will open up to us.
        Chairman Johnson. Obviously, that was the purpose of this
    hearing, to lay out a reality. Even if we do not like it, we do
    not want to face it, it is the only way to solve a problem.
    First, define it properly and then admit that you have one.
        Dr. Haykel, can we just get back to some basics? Because I
    really think that this is very confusing to most Americans. Why
    do Sunnis want to kill Shia and vice versa? Can you just
    describe the Sunni-Shia split within Islam?
        Mr. Haykel. Well, it is a split that dates back 1,400 years
    to the time when, after the death of the Prophet, there was a
    difference of opinion over succession, over who was to succeed
    the Prophet. And the majority went one way and the minority
    went the other way. The majority are the Sunnis; the minority
    are the Shiites.
        Now, over time, this sectarian split--you can think of it
    as Catholic versus Protestant. It was not actually mobilized
    for military purposes or for sectarian wars. It is only evident
    historically, and today, when States, when governments, choose
    to use this form of identity, form of religious identity, for
    very specific purposes, typically geostrategic purposes and to
    achieve goals that States want to achieve. So you see the
    Saudis----
        Chairman Johnson. What was the first instance of States
    using this split to go to war with each other?
        Mr. Haykel. Well, the most prominent one in pre-modern
    times was when the Ottomans fought the Safavids. The Ottomans
    were based in Turkey, and the Safavids were based in Iran. And
    they used this difference in religion to fight one another.
    Today we see it in the fight between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
        But I think one has to dig deeper than just the sectarian--
    I mean, the sectarian language gives cover for what is
    otherwise a battle over power.
        Chairman Johnson. And then even within the Shia-Sunni,
    there are factions within those groups as well, which is,
    again, even more confusing. Sunni governments obviously want to
    destroy ISIS because ISIS wants to destroy them. They are all
    basically kind of Sunni-based, correct?
        Mr. Haykel. That is correct. There are divisions within it,
    and my advice to the U.S. Government is not to enter into the
    fray of these sectarian wars, because we should not take sides,
    for one, and, two, I do not think, again, that we have standing
    to decide what is and what is not correct, Islamically. I think
    that we should be very hard-nosed about what our interests are
    and pursue those relentlessly.
        Chairman Johnson. And what are those interests then? Again,
    we want to defeat ISIS.
        Mr. Haykel. Right.
        Chairman Johnson. In order to do that, from my standpoint--
    this is kind of my third question, too--we need to develop what
    I have been calling a ``committed coalition of the willing.'' I
    often use the model of the First Gulf War where literally our
    coalition partners supplied 240,000 troops to that effort, paid
    for about 85 percent of it. Now, that is a committed coalition
    of the willing. But today we need a committed coalition of
    Sunni Arab States, correct? Because of the history, because we
    bugged out, and because we have had some problems. Can you just
    describe the lack of confidence, from your perspective, of the
    Sunni States right now in American leadership and why they
    might be reluctant to join this coalition?
        Mr. Haykel. The principal reason that Sunni States are not
    fully joining this coalition is because they do not regard ISIS
    as the principal enemy that they are facing. So the Saudis, for
    instance, would think that Iran is much more dangerous. The
    Turks think that the Kurds are much more dangerous. And,
    frankly, Iran itself is playing a double game, in that it is
    both convenient for ISIS to exist there because it keeps the
    Sunni world in disarray, and it creates an enemy that is
    convenient for the Iranians, and it brings the West on to their
    side with Assad and to side with Iran.
        So, this is a part of the world where, what is really
    happening is not obvious, and one cannot have any illusions,
    because all of these States use forces, these forces like ISIS,
    for their own purposes.
        Chairman Johnson. So I would like to give you the
    opportunity to just go through that in a little greater detail,
    I guess starting with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and just
    really describing in detail what their aims are, who they are
    concerned about, who their true enemy is, and who their
    corollary enemy is because, again, it is incredibly complex.
    Can you just step through that again in greater detail?
        Mr. Haykel. Sure, and I will in a thumbnail----
        Chairman Johnson. Again, kind of talking about their
    strategic goals and aims.
        Mr. Haykel. The Saudis basically want to reverse Iranian
    influence throughout the Arab world. They consider Iran's
    projection of power, especially through non-State actors like
    Hezbollah and the militias of southern Iraq, to be
    unacceptable, and they want to roll it back because they want
    to dominate that region. They consider the region to be Arab,
    and they consider themselves to be the dominant power in that--
    --
        Chairman Johnson. And what was their goal in terms of the
    Wahhabism schools and setting all of that up?
        Mr. Haykel. Actually, the Saudis were never involved in
    setting up Wahhabism is either Iraq or Syria, because the
    regimes in those two countries, authoritarian regimes, would
    not permit the Saudis to do this. So the conversion of the
    Sunnis of Syria and Iraq to Salafism is a very recent thing,
    and it is--I think that there are reasons for why they are
    doing this, why the Sunnis are becoming Salafists. I think that
    it has to do with power again.
        Chairman Johnson. So maybe not there, but they spread
    Wahhabism----
        Mr. Haykel. They spread Wahhabism throughout the world.
        Chairman Johnson. And their aim in doing that was what?
        Mr. Haykel. Well, actually, it was largely to fight against
    Communism, Arab socialism, and Arab nationalism. They were
    threatened by a form of politics that was deeply destabilizing
    to monarchical rule, so they spread an Islamic solidarity,
    Islamic identity movement and campaign, beginning in the early
    1960s, largely and often in coordination with us, actually.
        Chairman Johnson. So to really protect the House of Saud.
        Mr. Haykel. Correct.
        Chairman Johnson. OK. So there is encapsulated Saudi
    Arabia.
        Mr. Haykel. Yes.
        Chairman Johnson. Move on to Iran, then.
        Mr. Haykel. So Iran basically has yet to decide whether it
    is a normal country or a revolution, and inasmuch as the hard-
    liners in Iran still believe in the revolution, they want to
    project the power of Iran, militarily, but also soft power,
    revolutionary power, through proxies, from the Palestinian
    territories all the way----
        Chairman Johnson. So describe that in detail, because
    everybody talks about how they are recognized as the largest
    State sponsor of terror. Describe that. Describe the groups
    that they are supporting and why they are doing it.
        Mr. Haykel. Right. So they support certain factions amongst
    the Palestinians. Hamas, for a while, was on their payroll, and
    there is another faction in Gaza that is with--Islamic jihad
    that is with Iran. In Lebanon, they have Hezbollah. They have a
    number of militias in southern Iraq. They support the Assad
    regime and also a number of militias that are fighting with the
    Assad regime.
        As far as the Middle East is concerned, by far, the most
    destabilizing country has been Iran. The Assad regime, for
    instance, which would not have survived without Iranian
    backing, has killed close to 300,000 people and has made 11
    million people displaced as refugees. So, ISIS actually pales
    in comparison with Iran, in terms of instability in the region.
        Chairman Johnson. What about Turkey?
        Mr. Haykel. Turkey is an interesting country inasmuch as it
    has been cut off from the Middle East for some 80 years, and it
    has rediscovered the Middle East and thought that it, as a
    successful country, could dominate it through soft power.
    Turkey has quickly realized that the Middle East is much more
    complicated, and they thought, I think, until recently, that
    ISIS could be contained. And then ISIS started a suicide
    bombing campaign against the Turks. So the pipeline of recruits
    has shut down as a result of this. But Turkey still remains in
    an old model of thinking about the world. For them, the Kurds
    remain the most dangerous element because they represent 20
    percent of the Turkish population and could potentially secede
    from the country.
        Chairman Johnson. Can you talk about the difference within
    the Kurdish population between those in Turkey, the Kurdistan
    Workers' Party (PKK), and the Iraqi Kurds?
        Mr. Haykel. I mean, there are differences certainly between
    them politically, but on the whole, I would think of the Kurds
    as an American--as natural allies for us, especially those in
    Syria and in Iraq. They are a long-suffering population. They
    have really suffered and have never had their own country. And
    you can think of them almost like Israel, as a group of people
    that will always be a natural ally of the United States in the
    region.
        Chairman Johnson. OK. Does anybody else want to feed into
    this line of questioning? Seeing Senator Booker has been
    faithful in sticking around, I will let you have a couple of
    extra questions as well. But does anybody else want to comment
    on this?
        [No response.]
        Senator Booker.
        Senator Booker. Thank you very much. I appreciate your
    patience and the indulgence of the Chairman.
        I just have really one last line of questioning, and it
    really goes to this experience that I had 2 weeks ago when I
    was in the Middle East--I was in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and
    Turkey--and sat down with Saudi Arabian leaders, many of them
    women and activists, and sat down with others in Turkey, from
    Erawan to just individuals I met on my way there. And I was
    sort of surprised at how much they were concerned that this
    Nation, America, was turning anti-Islamist. Do we hate Muslims?
    And I found myself having to explain that that was not our
    stance and actually get very strong in reasserting or
    reaffirming the pluralistic society in which we live, the
    loving and tolerant society in which we live.
        I guess my question for all of you is really, there seems
    to be this counterbacklash, as I try to observe it, over this
    alleged political correctness and how this country talks about
    Islam, about how this country talks about the terrorism that we
    are seeing. And I am wondering, basically, does language really
    matter and how we frame this to the rest of the world. Some of
    the comments that we have, some of the comments many people
    believe is demagoguery, is that hurting our ability--because I
    am about winning. Is it hurting our ability to deal with the
    ISIS threat and how we are characterizing it or how some of the
    characterizations have been out there. I think this is
    important coming from specialists like you, for me at least, to
    help understand American rhetoric and what we are seeing in the
    media by political candidates, as well as elected Senators.
    Anybody?
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Absolutely it does hurt. It does hurt our
    ability to win. And I think it is because----
        Senator Booker. So you are saying it hurts our ability to
    win in the battle against ISIS.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Absolutely. Vilifying all of Islam and
    Muslims of course will hurt us. So talking about not letting
    Muslims into the country anymore or that Islam is the problem
    will alienate 1.2 billion people for sure.
        But that does not mean that we cannot have a rational and
    intelligent conversation about what the threat is. So if you
    had asked me 5 years ago, I would have told you that I
    advocated calling it ``radical Islamism,'' and I used the word
    ``Islamism'' to make a distinction between that and mainstream
    Islam. The problem is that it has metastasized so badly with
    ISIS that there is only a sliver of theology left on top now,
    and there are all these other countercultural, anti-social
    components to what is radicalizing individuals.
        But at the end of the day, there is this kind of long-term
    problem with warped, deviant interpretations of Islam
    constantly being used to galvanize violence. And I think that
    there is something to be said for what are we going to do about
    that element of the problem. And I think that the President's
    call to the Muslim community, ``We ask you to stand up, we ask
    you to talk to your Imams, and to take responsibility,'' was
    very important, because there is a piece of this that belongs
    to the Muslim community. I have a number of theories on why it
    has taken so long to speak up against it, but the fact is that
    there is a piece of this that belongs to the community, and I
    think that we need to do that together. But that requires us
    having a rational conversation about the subject.
        Senator Booker. And so you said that you used to call it
    ``radical Islamism.''
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Right.
        Senator Booker. What do you call it now?
        Ms. Mirahmadi. ``Violent extremism.''
        Senator Booker. ``Violent extremism.''
        Ms. Mirahmadi. I mean, for a number of reasons: one,
    because it is so politically incorrect to call it anything
    else, and----
        Senator Booker. But I am not worried about political
    correctness. I am worried about winning against ISIS. And so
    you are saying that it is not politically correct, but you are
    also saying that it is damaging, right?
        Ms. Mirahmadi. It is damaging because people do not like
    the association--Muslims do not like the association of Islam
    with this problem.
        Senator Booker. And so for that 27-year-old, it is
    alienating, it is further isolating, and in many ways adds to
    the climate in which people could be radicalized. Is that what
    you are saying?
        Ms. Mirahmadi. I do not know if that term does that to him.
        Senator Booker. Right.
        Ms. Mirahmadi. It is the feelings people have against Islam
    and Muslims. So I do not know if it is the term that would do
    it or just the way that our society is responding. So the
    bullying in schools, for example, a number of our clients, the
    young people who are the most vulnerable, are the ones that are
    getting constantly harassed in school, called ``towel head,''
    ``terrorist,'' or ``Osama.'' They are just maladapting. And so
    that is causing fissures in our communities across the country.
    There needs to be work done at the grassroots level, at the
    local level, to repair those fissures.
        Senator Booker. So seemingly innocent semantics coming from
    high-level leaders helps to drive intolerance? Is that----
        Ms. Mirahmadi. Well, if you talk about banning all Muslims,
    yes. There is a range, right? There is a difference between
    addressing radical Islamism as a component of the problem and
    banning all Muslims. There is a spectrum of terminology that
    could be used, but, a large representation of the Muslim
    community now do not like ``violent extremism'' either because
    they think that it is code for ``Muslim.''
        So I think that even though we try to avoid using certain
    terminology, we are still in the same place that we were before
    by fighting over terminology, rather than solving the problem.
        Senator Booker. Would anybody else like to offer thoughts
    on that?
        Ms. Stern. I think that it is important to remember that
    the primary victims of this ideology are Muslim, and I think
    that some of the primary victims are the mothers of the kids
    who are getting seduced, basically to commit suicide, in
    somebody else's losing war in another country. I think that
    hate speech right now is extremely dangerous, and I agree with
    you that certain political leaders who are indulging themselves
    in hate speech are really damaging our ability to fight this
    threat.
        Senator Booker. But do you think--you are not saying,
    obviously, that a term like ``radical Islam'' is hate speech.
    People using terminology like that, that is not problematic to
    you, right?
        Ms. Stern. Not for me. I mean, I think that the President's
    discomfort with calling this ``violent Islamist terrorism''--I
    understand why, but I do not agree. I mean, that is what it is.
    And the vast majority of Muslims do not agree with that
    ideology and are petrified--some parents are petrified that
    their kids might, in this process of growing up and of
    rebelling against their parents, be drawn to that ideology.
        Senator Booker. And so political leaders who say ``violent
    Islamic radicalism'' or ``violent Islamic extremism,'' that
    does no damage, in your opinion?
        Ms. Stern. That does not trouble me, but saying that we
    cannot allow Muslims to come into this country, that troubles
    me a lot.
        Senator Booker. Yes.
        Ms. Stern. Very dangerous.
        Senator Booker. Mr. Vidino, you seemed like you wanted to
    say something?
        Mr. Vidino. Just very briefly. I think that there are two
    levels of the conversation here. One is what public leaders
    say. I understand, to some degree, the trepidation when a
    President makes an address and the whole world is listening. I
    understand that there is a level of defensiveness, in Muslim
    communities and in allied countries, to any kind of statement
    that can, to some degree, associate Islam with violence. So the
    debate is much more open. When you go to Muslim majority
    countries, they talk about political Islam very freely among
    themselves.
        Senator Booker. Right.
        Mr. Vidino. But if somebody else that is non-Muslim, from
    outside, calls it ``political Islam,'' immediately you get a
    sense of defensiveness, which is completely understandable.
        Senator Booker. As a black guy----
        Mr. Vidino. What I am saying is that----
        Senator Booker [continuing]. I would not understand what
    you are talking about, words used by blacks that cannot be used
    by---- [Laughter.]
        Mr. Vidino. I guess to some degree. [Laughter.]
        Senator Booker. I would not understand.
        Mr. Vidino. What I am saying is also that there are two
    levels. So I understand why, at a level of the President or,
    anyways, elected leaders or political leaders in general, that
    there should be--people should be very careful about the terms
    that they use. Sometimes a little bit of carefulness is
    metastasized into a paralysis internally, where we do not talk
    about religion out of political correctness, and what could be,
    for example, debates within the administration and finding
    solutions, to some degree political correctness has blinded us,
    and we look at all other aspects which are indeed important and
    should be looked at, but we ignore the one that is religious.
        Senator Booker. That is a very good point.
        Mr. Vidino. Which is one of the components.
        Senator Booker. That is a very good point.
        Do you want to add anything to close it out at all? Being
    from Jersey, I would like for you to have the last word.
    [Laughter.]
        Mr. Haykel. Thank you. I definitely think that there is an
    Islamic genealogy to this group. The problem is that when you
    enter into the specifics, it gets very complicated, and for
    public discourse, it is better to be prudential and careful in
    how you use the term ``Islam.'' So I understand where the
    President is coming from. I do think, though, that an honest
    discussion about this problem has to involve how this group is
    using Islam for its purposes and where it is drawing its
    inspiration from.
        I would also like to end by saying that there are bound to
    be more attacks in the United States like the ones that we have
    seen already, unfortunately, and this is where we have to be
    super vigilant in how we respond, because the temptation will
    be to vilify the entire community of Muslims. And that is where
    I think that we have to not play into the narrative of ISIS,
    because that is exactly what they would want us to do.
        Senator Booker. Thank you for those wise words.
        Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Booker.
        I will tell you, as a Protestant Lutheran, if there is a
    radical band of Lutherans committing terrorist attack after
    terrorist attack, I would call them, ``Lutheran terrorists,''
    and I would denounce them, and I would renounce them. I think
    that is part of the problem. The truth is the truth, reality is
    reality, and this strain, which we will all admit is a small
    percentage, has to be defeated.
        So, again, I just want to thank Senator Booker----
        Senator Booker. Mr. Chairman, could we have a hearing on
    Lutheran terrorists, please? [Laughter.]
        Chairman Johnson. I am not aware that it is a problem.
    Prove to me that it is a problem, and we will have a hearing.
        Again, I just want to thank all of the witnesses and all of
    the Senators who came here. We had great attendance and
    excellent questions. I think that we did lay out some of the
    reality here. I think that we helped to further define the
    problem, and it is incredibly complex, and it is going to be a
    long-term project trying to solve it.
        With that, the hearing record will remain open for 15 days
    until February 4th at 5 p.m. for the submission of statements
    and questions for the record.
        This hearing is adjourned.
        [Whereupon, at 12:03 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]

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