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Hannah, a British woman of Indian descent, joined
a militant Muslim group when she was 18. Raised
Hindu, she began studying Islam during her first
year at a London university. On the suggestion of a
fellow student named Rashad Ali, Hannah attended
a campus meeting of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group that
espouses nonviolence in establishing a unified Islamic
state but has been linked to murder and praises jihad.
She fell hard for the rhetoric: She converted to Islam,
quit a student job at International Business Machines
Corp. to become a housekeeper for a woman who
belonged to Hizb ut-Tahrir, and stopped wearing
Western clothes. “Basically, I was going through a
brainwashing,” says Hannah, now in her 30s, who
spoke on condition of anonymity.
Over the next decade, she rose through the
group’s ranks by recruiting others, mostly on cam-
puses, at mosques, and later, while taking her three
kids to day care. Eventually, Hannah became Hizb
ut-Tahrir’s West London regional manager, oversee-
ing 20 fellow extremists. But she grew weary of the
deaths that came with jihad. She began to openly
question the group’s tactics and left, a pariah. Soon
after, she met Ali a second time, and again he radi-
cally changed her life.
Like Hannah, Ali had become disillusioned with
extremist ideology and had left Hizb ut-Tahrir. He’d
begun counseling jihadists who were questioning
their paths, offering guidance both online and in
person through the nonprofit Gen Next. It’s a network
for those “who’ve gone through similar journeys,”
says Hannah, who began volunteering with the orga-
nization in 2013. “I jumped at the opportunity.”
Gen Next says it’s worked to deprogram more
than 100 European radicals since 2008, and the
organization is about to start bringing its approach
to bear in the U.S. Its Against Violent Extremism
Network runs on about $1 million a year, with help
from London’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue (the
think tank where Ali is now a senior fellow) and
Jigsaw (the think tank formerly known as Google
Ideas). In Europe, Gen Next’s 20 full-time employ-
ees record antijihad videos, use ad data to target
potential jihadists with their counterprogramming,
and send former extremists such as Hannah to meet
with radicals who’ve expressed an interest in leaving
militancy behind.
Companies including Google and Facebook
Inc. have supplied Gen Next with funding and staff
hours, trying to help counter the propaganda-
spewing chat rooms, messaging services, and social
networks used to encourage acts of terror around○ Through Gen Next, former extremists
talk active ones out of terror plotsUsing Online Counseling
To Fight Jihad
THE BOTTOM LINE Gen Next has deprogrammed an estimated
100-plus extremists over a decade in Europe, and it’s trying to
bring that model to the U.S. in concert with local police.the world. But it’s the 450 former radicals, all vol-
unteers vetted by background checks, who shoulder
much of the work of deradicalizing potential terror-
ists, says Gen Next Chief Executive Officer Michael
Davidson. Hannah has reached out to 80 people
in the past four years. “Formers are the only way
someone on the edge sways,” Davidson says. “We
amplify that voice.”
Ali became a cyber jihadist at age 15. As an obser-
vant Muslim of Indian descent, he’d always felt iso-
lated in Sheffield, his industrial English hometown.
Following stints in Egypt, where he was trying to
organize a coup, and Saudi Arabia, he returned to
the U.K. to recruit students online, often by trolling
digital forums and bulletin boards. By the time he
became one of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s U.K. leaders, though,
he’d lost his zeal for what he now sees as an ideology
bereft of everything besides anger.
While Davidson won’t share many specifics of his
team’s methods, he says deprogrammers typically try
to meet with radicals in person after connecting with
them through some combination of social media ser-
vices. With help from Google, the nonprofit has rejig-
gered search results in Europe so people looking for
one of 1,700 Islamic State-related keywords will find
videos mocking jihadists.
In the U.S., Gen Next’s network aims to use
a similar playbook in partnership with local law
enforcement agencies. The organization has quietly
finalized an agreement with the Seattle Police
Department to contact suspected radicals via social
media and send Gen Next volunteers to talk them
down in face-to-face meetings; the police would inter-
vene more directly if Gen Next discovers an immi-
nent threat. U.S.-based volunteers are set to begin
training Seattle police on Nov. 8.
Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who investigated
several high-profile terrorism cases, says such online
networks are becoming harder to infiltrate because
radicals increasingly eschew YouTube and Twitter in
favor of more private networks. And he questions the
sway former radicals have on hardliners. “When they
switch sides, they lose credibility,” he says.
For now, Davidson says, his team will work to
adapt its established tactics to the U.S. “The way
people get recruited in the first place is using human
stories and connections,” Hannah says. “In order to
get them out, we have to use those same methods.”
—Adam Popescu“Formers are
the only way
someone
on the edge
sways. We
amplify that
voice” TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek October 30, 2017