Brussels Terrorist Attack: Why Do Family Members Collaborate In Terrorist Attacks?
A number of extremists seem to be linked by more than ideology. They are mostly blood brothers.
"A terror cell made up of two brothers cannot be infiltrated. It's the most secure network possible," said Claude Moniquet, a French security analyst who works in Brussels.
Two of the three assaulters of Brussels, Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui, were brothers who killed at least 34 and injured 270 in Brussels on Tuesday.
Other siblings were Salah and Brahim Abdeslam, both from Brussels. They had a significant role in the November attacks that killed 130 in Paris. Said and Cherif Kouachi killed 12 in the Paris-based satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The Tsarnaev brothers triggered a couple of blasts at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon, in which three were killed, while 260 were injured.
The sibling cooperation is familiar for most, for in 1995, brothers plotted the victorious assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
About 25 per cent of westerners travelling to Syria and Iraq fought with extremists, with some kind of family ties with the fundamentalists, according to a study by the New America Foundation
"It's just the obvious situation where you depend on someone who you know very well and won't back out of it," David Rapoport, a professor of terrorism at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Mashable.
Often, siblings simply slipped into the role of extremists once a family member asked for help, explains Clark McCauley, a research professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College.
He also believes that the current successful extremist attacks by siblings are an "adaptation to the pressure security services are putting on terrorists." It combines the advantages of "lone wolf" extremists with the situation when they also take the help of extra brains.
"Two sets of hands are better than one as long as you don't have a security concern that comes from more people," McCauley said. "The chance of the security services breaking into this close connection is very small."
