Nidal

“You know what I did? I left troops to take the oil. I took the oil. The only troops I have are taking the oil, they’re protecting the oil. I took over the oil.”

  • Paradise jihadis: Maldives sees surge in young Muslims leaving for Syria
    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/26/paradise-jihadis-maldives-islamic-extremism-syria

    “The politicians need us to intimidate opponents or stop rallies, or stop other gangs stopping their rallies. Almost all the gangs are connected to political figures in one way or another,” explained Ibrahim “Chica” Nafeez, the 34-year-old leader of the well-known Buru gang, which runs one neighbourhood in Malé.

    The World Bank has blamed the ease with which the gangs recruited young Maldivians [pdf] on “inactivity and apathy, unemployment, drug use and “the need for young men to prove their masculinity”.

    Such factors have also been seen as encouraging radicalisation elsewhere, with repeated examples of the worlds of gangs and extremists overlapping. Omar Abdel Hamid el-Hussein, the 22-year-old who shot dead two people in Copenhagen, was involved with local criminal organisations, police said.

    In recent years, a string of attacks on so-called secular activists in the Maldives have been blamed on radicalised gang members. One blogger was badly injured in 2012 and a moderate cleric and parliamentarian stabbed to death outside his home. Gang members last year threatened local activists who ran blogs and Facebook pages calling for tolerance for homosexuals, and in August Rilwan Ahmed Abdulla, a journalist and blogger, was abducted and has not been seen since.

    […]

    Security analysts believe the focus on the gangs themselves may be misplaced and that the problem lies more with hardline community leaders and preachers who work behind the scenes to organise the harassment of the “secular” activists, and demonstrations such as one that took place in September in support of Isis. “They are the real key to the problem,” said a recently retired local security official.