What makes a doctor become a terrorist?

By Michael Burleigh for the Daily Mail

Published: 23:08 GMT, 27 August 2012 | Updated: 15:39 GMT, 30 August 2012

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A famous philosopher once said that ‘those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it’. In the Eighties, Afghanistan became a magnet for large numbers of foreign Islamist fanatics bent on waging war on the Soviets. More went later to fight in Bosnia and Chechnya. They were the hardcore of Al Qaeda terrorists who brought mayhem to New York, Madrid and London.

Today, the international jihadi flotsam and jetsam are flocking to Syria, where, in their typically parasitic fashion, they have attached themselves to the rebel fight against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

A worrying number of these men are not exiled Syrians or Kurds returning to a personal conflict, but British citizens of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sudanese origin, with no connections to Syria and who do not even speak Syrian-Arabic.

Extremists: The militants flocking to Syria claim they are there to support the global Muslim 'umma', the community of believers

They are there to support the global Muslim umma — the community of believers — to which they feel far greater loyalty than the mere nation they operate in, whether it be Britain or Syria.

Shocking evidence of their mentality was revealed last month when British photographer John Cantlie and a Dutch colleague were held hostage for a week by 40 rebel fighters, 15 of them British Islamist extremists who spoke English with Midlands and South London accents.

Both hostages were shot during an escape bid, and were then beaten with AK-47 rifle butts as they sat bound and blindfolded, awaiting their fate.

Disturbingly, their wounds were treated by an Anglo-Pakistani doctor who claimed he had taken a two-year sabbatical from his NHS post in Britain so as to wage jihad while improving his knowledge of trauma cases with a view to working in an A&E department.

The hostages and their doctor captor even exchanged views on the NHS: ‘He told us [it] was good if you’re in a serious accident, but if you’re on a hip-replacement waiting list it’s terrible.’

The presence of a medical doctor in a terrorist camp should not surprise us. In other Syrian jihadi camps you can find a Tennessee-trained Saudi dentist, a French-Moroccan physiotherapist from Paris, and a medical student from Tunisia.

We have seen this involvement of medical men in terrorism time and again. In 2007 Iraqi medic Dr Bilal Abdullah tried to ram a Jeep Cherokee laden with propane gas tanks into the doors of Glasgow airport. His colleague burned to death, and Abdullah is now serving a 32-year jail sentence.

Jailed for 32 years: A court sketch of Iraqi doctor and would-be car bomber Bilal Abdullah

The current leader of Al Qaeda is Egyptian eye surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri, who took over from Osama Bin Laden after he was killed. Likewise, one of the founding leaders of the Palestinian terror group Hamas was paediatrician Abdel Aziz Rantisi, who after his death in an Israeli air strike in 2004, was replaced by Mahmoud al-Zahar — an Egyptian-trained surgeon.

When we go further back, to the Marxist-Leninist terrorists of the Seventies, we find Dr George Habbash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — who was a pensioner in Syria and died in Jordan in 2008. Then there is Dr Waddi Haddad of a Popular Front faction, among whose exploits was the 1975 attack on the OPEC meeting in Vienna, where several oil ministers were taken hostage by Carlos the Jackal, then the world’s most wanted terrorist.

Many of the modern world’s first terrorists — the 19th-century Russian nihilists — were medical doctors and students. They believed that assassinating the Tsar would solve all Russia’s problems at a stroke.

What is it about terrorism that seems to attract a disproportionate number of the medical fraternity?
Doctors are hard-working, organised and intelligent. They are also a comparative rarity in developing societies, where they can enjoy an elevated status because they so often have the power of life or death over desperately impoverished people in need of medical help. But it is not just about social status. The Hippocratic oath, which doctors swear before they enter the profession, is a pledge to practise medicine ethically and honestly — as well as to keep the sick from ‘harm and injustice’.
And in the twisted mind of the jihadi, harm and injustice is often perceived as the handiwork of heretic rulers like Assad and behind them oppression by the West of Muslims in general.

Furthermore, the discipline of medicine involves exposure to human suffering; it can result in indifference to bloodshed.

It can brutalise individuals, and — given that it is sometimes necessary for doctors to inflict pain for the patient’s good — lead to the belief that some purgative act of violence can rectify society’s evils like the cut of a surgeon’s scalpel.

We are dealing here with a warped idealism, which is even more dangerous than the more obvious resentments of extremists who work in their parents’ corner shop in a grim northern British town and have few opportunities for advancement.

After all, a knowledge of science will help an individual understand how bombs are made; they will know where the red or green wires on detonators go, and are unlikely to confuse a hijacked plane’s radio with buttons and levers for the cabin pressure.

It is telling that the only profession that is more common than medicine among terrorists is engineering — which is even more handy when it comes to bomb-making. Like medicine, engineering is often the most prestigious vocation in developing countries.

In a study of 75 jihadists responsible for the four most serious terrorist incidents across the world between 1993 and 2005, experts Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey found the most popular subjects among those who had attended university were engineering and medicine.

Two-thirds of the 25 terrorists involved in the 9/11 attacks had attended university. In Britain, university campuses are still recruiting grounds for the jihadists despite repeated government claims to be tackling the problem.

Heathrow Airport: Surely it would be possible to remove the passports of suspected Jihadis returning from Syria?

It is true that the doctors of death are but a small component of the foreign fighters heading to Syria. The jihadist army from Britain is alleged by Dr Salah al Bander, a former Lib Dem councillor in West London, to have been incited by sermons delivered at mosques such as the Dar us Sunnah Mosque in London’s Shepherd’s Bush Market and by so-called ‘sheiks’ (self-appointed religious leaders) in the West Midlands.

But wherever they are being recruited, and whether or not they are well-educated, these radical fighters are cocking a snook at British authorities unwilling to act against their citizens participating in someone else’s civil war, and in support of a jihadist agenda that may come back to haunt us.
These British jihadis are making contacts, and learning skills that could yet result in terror on our streets.

Since it is possible to remove the passports of British football hooligans before a major international fixture, surely we could do the same with any suspected jihadi returning from Syria, for their identities are not that hard to discover.

Moreover, all of the 90,000 or so foreign doctors working in the NHS are subject to regular professional review. Anyone found to have been fighting in Syria (or anywhere else) should be struck off immediately, and in the case of non-British nationals, deported.

It is to this country’s shame that it has become a leading exporter of jihadi sympathisers. And doubly so if those jihadis have been trained by the NHS, where an optional sabbatical in a war zone, gun in hand, is not part of the package.

Michael Burleigh is the author of Blood & Rage: A Cultural History Of Terrorism.

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