The state of Minnesota has developed a new strategy to deal with the issue of their residents considering leaving the United States and joining the Islamic State.
The Twin Cities of Minnesota have created a “community intervention team,” made up of religious and business leaders, to deal with domestic radicalization. The new strategy is meant to be an alternative to using law enforcement to combat this issue, according to Yahoo News:
“Last year in Minnesota, U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger spoke to relatives and friends of a few of the 20 young Somali men who had left the country to become foreign fighters and asked them what they thought went wrong. Everyone’s stories varied, except for one key detail: They had sensed a change in their loved one before he left the Twin Cities to fight with terrorists. They just didn’t know whom to tell, or were scared to involve law enforcement officials.”
The effort is intended to provide an avenue for family and friends to get help for their endangered loved ones without fear of them being arrested:
“The first phone calls will be to religious leaders, family counselors and mental health professionals,” Luger said of the intervention teams. The community has said to me, ‘If we can turn this around, we want to do it on our own.”
“Law enforcement will get involved if the person is serious about traveling and is taking steps to travel that cannot be handled at home,” he said. “But frankly, if this works the way we hope it will, there’ll be less work for law enforcement to do, which is our overall goal.”
Andy Luger has been working on fighting this problem with a vested interest, especially after a Minnesota woman told him the story of her cousin joining the Islamic State:
“He wasn’t the kind of person who would engage in this,” she told Minnesota U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger and others at the gathering. “When we saw it happening, we did not know what to do, who to call, who to reach out to.
“Frankly,” the woman added, “we were embarrassed and wished it away. And then he left and then he was gone. We wish we had taken action sooner.”
Defenders of this type of approach believe that it gives more incentive to help others without any fear of reprisal, rather than family and friends saying nothing until it is too late.
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