The profile of the average terrorist is changing, Dr Marc Sageman - a former CIA field officer and now internationally respected terrorism expert and author - told a conference in Australia.Five years ago, the average terrorist was in his mid-20s, married with kids, university-educated, middle-class, psychologically stable and probably an engineer. Today, he's more likely to be poor, of limited education and a second- or third-generation product of the culture he is attacking.
The well-educated young men who were radicalised while studying in the West (engineering was the most common degree) and who conducted the 9/11 attacks, had been replaced by self-trained, self-recruited and, thanks to the welfare state, self-financed "terrorist wannabes", in their early 20s and who recruited mostly on the internet.
Dr Sageman said there were "potentially thousands" of these "new" terrorists,
In strark contrast to a recent Washington Post story about the reemergence of a strong centralised Al-Qaeda (Al Qaeda Has Reconstituted into an Organised, Centrally-Driven Organisation, Warns Washington Post) , Dr Sageman said al-Qaeda's leaders had been all but cut off from the current crop of jihadists and comprised no more than two dozen people.
Kinship bonds were the glue that held most terror cells together, rather than ethnicity, religion or ideology, he said.
