Saputra 1 Sofyan Saputra 10/25/2011 Community Based Writing and Rhetoric Dietel-McLaughlin Exploratory Draft In this paper I plan

to speculate about the methods Middle Eastern terrorist groups use to attract and recruit members. On October 21, 2011, Obama declared the end of U.S. military operations in Iraq. After nearly a decade of battling against terrorism in the Middle East due to the infamous September 11 attacks, the end is in sight. However, what motivations encouraged so many human beings to sacrifice their lives to commit acts of brutal violence? How exactly do terrorist groups convince members of society to take up arms and fight for their evil goals? Being an American who finds difficulty comprehending why people are willing to be suicide bombers and murder in the name of jihad, I am very interested in gaining a new perspective about terrorists and their motivations. It is also very important for the government to understand the methods terrorists use to replenish their ranks. The United States spent nearly a trillion dollars on the Iraq War. Taking into account the number of innocent lives killed in the process, it would have been much more effective to negate terrorist groups before they have attained influence. Groups such as Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah have such deep-rooted connections to society that eliminating them requires knowledge on how they acquire new members: new suicide bombers, new jihad fighters, new masterminds. This way, these large terror organizations can be cut off at the source. Whilst interesting to intellectuals and others who want a new perspective on terrorists, there is no doubt that a paper about this topic would be critical for government officials and other

Saputra 2 anti-terrorist organizations, such as the United Nations. With knowledge about terrorist recruiting tactics, the government would be able to take steps to mitigate such tactics from being applied. For example, rather than sending troops, the United States could provide economic assistance to poverty-stricken Middle Eastern countries. Although governments and large organizations are difficult to persuade, ideas about this from scholars may be able gradually convince the government to reconsider their counter-terrorist strategies. The best way to convince the government would be to provide thorough statistics and case examples to highlight the tactics terrorists are using to find new members. There is an extremely detailed series about the recruitment and training of terrorists by James J. Forest. There are three volumes in the series and each is approximately four-hundred pages. This book is not difficult to read and is extremely fascinating and useful. It contains numerous statistics and case examples. Of course I plan to use other sources as well. There are several other scholarly books about the making of a terrorist and the mindset of people being lured into terrorist groups that I have found. Article databases have also yielded several excellent results, such as an article about terrorist recruitment activities in Saudi Arabia. I plan to extensively examine Forests book while looking for recent scholarly articles on the topic. Moreover, I will peruse the theories of violence discussed in class to find general explanations for terrorists motivations for violence. Despite the seemingly daunting task of finding scholarly sources, the searching tools equipped to me by the librarians and the Pot of Gold tutorial has helped me find excellent and specific sources. I have no shortage of information and doubt I will have to use less reliable searching methods such as Google. My main concern is condensing the wealth of information I have into eight to ten

Saputra 3 pages. There are so many interesting facets to this discussion that choosing the most pertinent pieces of information to research will be extremely difficult. There is also the usual difficultly of organizing a wealth of information and arguments into one coherent paper.