Blood brothers: Why family members are more likely to engage in terrorism together
Many extremists who have committed high-profile attacks in recent years share more than an ideology. Often, they've come from the same blood.
Two of the three attackers who killed at least 34 and injured 270 in Brussels on Tuesday -- Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui -- were brothers.
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And there are plenty other recent examples of extremist brothers.
Salah and Brahim Abdeslam -- both from Brussels -- played a huge part in the November attacks in Paris that left 130 dead.
Earlier that year, Said and Cherif Kouachi stormed the offices of the Paris-based satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, a duo that came to be known as the Tsarnaev brothers set off two blasts at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring 260.
This phenomena is not new. In 1995, two brothers plotted the successful assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. There are many examples from far earlier. n addition, research by the New America Foundation shows that around 25% of westerners who travel to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside extremists have some type of family connection to extremist activity.
"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.
Siblings often become extremists after an already-involved family member simply asks for help, Clark McCauley, a research professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College, said.
But McCauley also feels that the recent spate of successful extremist attacks pulled off by siblings are an "adaptation to the pressure security services are putting on terrorists."
This adaptation, he said, combines the advantages of "lone wolf" extremists with the benefit of two or more brains and two or more sets of hands.
"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."
He brought up the couple in San Bernardino, California who killed 14 people in December, seemingly without warning.
Tight cells of familial extremists, no matter their influences or supposed connections to larger groups, simply drop fewer hints for security officials to pick up on.
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Colin is Mashable's US & World Reporter. He previously interned at Foreign Policy magazine and The American Prospect. Colin is a graduate from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. When he's not at Mashable, you can most likely find him eating or playing some kind of sport.
