Crime and gangs: the path to battle for Australia’s Islamist radicals

 Muslim worshippers walk into the Gallipoli Mosque to pray in the western Sydney suburb of Auburn September 26, 2014.

(Reuters) – The children of refugees who fled Lebanon’s civil war for peaceful Australia in the 1970s form a majority of Australian militants fighting in the Middle East, according to about a dozen counter-terrorism officials, security experts and Muslim community members.

Of the 160 or so Australian jihadists believed to be in Iraq or Syria, several are in senior leadership positions, they say.

But unlike fighters from Britain, France or Germany, who experts say are mostly jobless and alienated, a number of the Australian fighters grew up in a tight-knit criminal gang culture, dominated by men with family ties to the region around the Lebanese city of Tripoli, near the border with Syria.

Still, there is a clear nexus between criminals and radicals within the immigrant Lebanese Muslim community, New South Wales Deputy Police Commissioner Nick Kaldas told Reuters.

The ease with which some hardened criminals from within the community have taken to militant extremism, and the prospect of what they will do when they return home from the Middle East battle-trained, is a major worry for authorities, he said.

In recent years, he said, the divide between criminal gangs and radicals in Lebanese community, who were driven by different motives, had narrowed.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott says that at least 20 of the fighters are believed by authorities to have returned to Australia, and that more than 60 people believed to be planning to go to the Middle East have had their passports canceled.

A broad sampling of the areas in Sydney most associated with Lebanese ancestry on the 2011 national census – Auburn, Lakemba, Punchbowl, Granville – show them lagging far behind the rest of New South Wales state on indicators such as income and employment.

“It’s a troubled community as a group,” said Greg Barton, director of the Global Terrorism Research Centre at Monash University. “So they’re over-represented in petty crime, in organized crime, in religious extremism.”

Aftab Malik, a Scholar-in-Residence at Sydney’s Lebanese Muslim Association who has spent years living in western Sydney’s Muslim community, said he believed the convergence between radical Islam and organized crime was unique to Australia.”I haven’t come across that in the U.S. or in Great Britain. It’s quite specific here and I don’t know why that is,” he said.