Covert Islamist Death-Mongering

"Since Islamic volunteers went to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1980s, the phenomenon of tourist jihadis has been there."
"There's still some of that, but there are more people who are serious fanatics. We don't have a very good handle on how many of these people are being turned around into something else."
Bruce Riedel CIA veteran, director, Intelligence Project, Brookings Institute, Washington

"There is no one profile; if there was a profile, it would be easy."
"Instead, you get girls as young as 14. The modes of recruitment and radicalization are now totally different. It's all digital now."
Jean-Louis Bruguiere, former French anti-terrorism magistrate

British medical student Mujahidah Bint Usama poses with a severed head as children look on(Twitter)

Social networking and the ease by which people can now communicate has made everything just so much more convenient. Who might ever have imagined that the Internet would morph into a useful medium through which nihilistic violence could be generated, advised, incited, grown apace? The decision by the U.S. administration to once again become involved in the Middle East to rescue Muslims from Islamism, has drawn the deadly ire of those slaughtering the vulnerable.

Just as a variety of countries within the Western orbit have declared themselves prepared to aid in the renewed war on terror, while the countries most closely allied both with funding, inciting and training fundamentalist Islamists only to see them outgrow their control, and fearing their Frankenstein-amok psychopathy, stand back because they are loathe to be seen to be helping a foreign power destroy those who are, after all, only conforming to the Islamic dictate to surrender to jihad.

Western nations which have once again chosen to step into the breach between violent conflict and civil discourse are now more focused as well on the high probability that they too will become more frequent targets for atrocities beyond their normal undercurrent of concern knowing that jihadists will eventually plan to get around to turning their attention on Western targets, once they've reached a point of saturation through bloodshed in the Middle East and North Africa.

Intelligence officials relating to the U.S., U.K., French, Greek and Turkish (!) efforts to deter the obvious threat of jihadists returning to their point of departure, all relate to the same concern. The witness of videos, tweets and other propaganda sources where Western-passported jihadis boast of their exploits on behalf of violent jihad is testament to the numbers and their utter depravity in departure from what is seen as the civil norms of human behaviour in the Western social compact.

There are those, who have allowed their faces, their voices and their deadly scorn to be publicly revealed, and then there are those who are studiously covert, maintaining a cloak of secrecy too opaque for most national intelligence service agents to discern, though they may suspect. A citizen with a Western passport travelling seemingly legitimately because they do it so frequently and always have, to visit family, or study abroad, surreptitiously enters Syria, maintaining the same low profile.

Access to training indoctrination or planning for attacks to be carried out where they are least expected and most feared. Independent researchers identify jihadists along with thousands of intelligence officials who track databases, but those are the relatively easy pickings. The covert jihadists are not the ones who reveal themselves by bragging on jihadist Internet sites, and then closely monitored on their return to their 'home' countries of citizenship.

"What we can't do is let down our guards for any of these" groups, warned John Brennan, director of the CIA. "You have to be looking at some of these smaller groups", he warned. Those groups represent the al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda affiliate) which has pledged to launch attacks outside Syria. Fighters for al-Nusra maintain a lower profile aiming their videos at local Muslims, claims the Mapping Militant Organizations project at Stanford University, California.

They aren't closeup and repugnantly belligerent in the same way as the Islamic State jihadis. The more careful, better-trained fighters aren't readily identified, either by surveillance at suspicious mosques or keeping careful watch over young men with criminal records.