Europe's Boys of Jihad

At 13, Salah left Paris for Syria, allegedly to aid insurgents in Iraq. He and others like him represent radical Islam's newer, younger face.

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Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the thousands of militants from around the world who flocked to Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and to the wars in Chechnya and Bosnia-Herzegovina, were mostly in their 20s and 30s. In his book profiling 172 jihadis of that era, "Understanding Terror Networks," Sageman found a median age of 26, as "most people joined the jihad well past adolescence."

In the aftermath of Sept. 11 and the Iraq war, however, the process of radicalization has spread and speeded up. At an age when angry teens in Los Angeles drift into street gangs, some of their peers in Europe plunge into global networks that send them to train, fight and die in far-off lands.

"Iraq is the motor," said a senior French anti-terrorism official, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. "It's making them all go crazy, want to be shaheed . The danger of suicide attacks in Europe and the United States increases as you have younger guys who are fervent and easily manipulated."

Along with longtime resentment and alienation experienced by some in immigrant communities, technology such as computers and Arabic-language satellite TV plays a major role in molding militants earlier, European officials say. Internet sites and chat rooms have become a virtual sanctuary, widening access to propaganda and training materials for an emerging "second generation" of extremists.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-kidjihadis2apr02,0,3852038.story?coll=la-home-headlines

with an, Iraq, Terrorist State. It is analogous to cutting the head, off Medusa.