A former jihadi on what ‘countering violent extremism’ gets wrong

Jesse Morton brought a unique perspective to peace building and countering violent extremism. In disciplines that prize “field experience,” Morton offered something way beyond the norm: years of personal indoctrination and involvement with jihadi networks.

At 16, Morton ran away to New York from his home in Pennsylvania. While incarcerated for dealing drugs, he was “recruited” by a fellow inmate who said he had fought with the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. Morton converted to Islam, taking the name Younus Abdullah Muhammad.

Once described by The New York Times as “one of the most prolific recruiters for Al Qaeda,” Morton was arrested in Morocco in 2011 and held in prison there before being extradited back to the United States in 2012 to serve an 11-year sentence. Having grown disillusioned with his fundamentalist past, Morton agreed to work with the FBI as an informant, with his sentence soon reduced.

After his release in 2015, in a controversial move, Morton was hired as a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. He was fired by the university months later after an arrest on drug and prostitution charges. A longtime collaborator writes that his drug use was linked to the “underlying psychological issues that led him to extremism in the first place.”

Despite the setback, which brought renewed skepticism of Morton’s credibility, he continued in his efforts to reverse-engineer the extremist mindset, founding an organization called Parallel Networks that focused on countering violent extremism, or CVE.

Morton died unexpectedly on Dec. 21, 2021, at the age of 43. On Thursday, he was posthumously awarded the Melanie Greenberg U.S. Peacebuilding Award of Excellence by the Alliance for Peacebuilding.

Morton spoke to Devex roughly one year ago for an article about U.S. President Joe Biden’s prospects for improving U.S. efforts around CVE. The interview extended beyond the parameters of the article, and in light of Morton’s death and his rare personal perspective, Devex has decided to share more of it.

The philosophy underpinning Parallel Networks, a Virginia-based nonprofit that works on CVE around the world and where Morton was executive director, speaks directly to his own example as a former extremist recruiter who — when given an opportunity to do so — was able to find and describe a path out of that worldview.

“A ‘parallel network’ is based on the notion that you can't feed into an ‘us versus them’ divide by taking sides in conflict, that you have to … attack a problem at a higher order of consciousness than that which creates it,” Morton said.

“To interact with extremist networks, you have to build a network that is antithetical to hate and extremism,” he said.

That necessitates a holistic approach, one more in line with public health interventions than what has characterized a lot of CVE efforts in the past, Morton said. It also requires those seeking to counter violent extremism to reject a “clash of civilizations” mindset that imagines extremists as theological or ideological enemies, he said.

“The worldview and the ideology espoused by jihadists is much more sociopolitical and economic than it is theological. It's just sociopolitical economic grievance in a religious framework that makes it all the more appealing,” he said.

That can lead to uncomfortable conclusions, such as the ways in which the United States’ own foreign policy can be an “incredibly valuable” recruitment tool among jihadis.

“You can't argue with a theological message so much as you have to realize that extremists belong to groups, and they join groups because everybody has a need for group belonging. If you don't create a group that they can belong to as an alternative to those that are advocating for violent extremism, then you can't fulfill those needs,” he said.

Morton said that he was encouraged by the passage of the U.S. Global Fragility Act in 2019, which seeks to bring about a rethink of how the U.S. engages in conflict-affected states and CVE.

But he cautioned, “I don't know if the peace-building community has the ability to do what the Global Fragility Act demands, which is produce evidence-based outcomes.”

He pointed to two fronts on which U.S. efforts around CVE have fallen short in the past.

The first is in actually reaching and engaging with people and populations who are susceptible to extremism, as opposed to those who are “already ostensibly liberal and are probably elitist and have no ability to do anything effectively.”

The second is in getting funding and authority to the groups and people with the ability to reach the communities that a given program is trying to influence.

“All of the empirical evidence in the field suggests that you've got to find the right influencers and you have to get them to believe and work with them in partnership, and that they should be responsible for a large portion of the implementation,” he said.

Morton was highly critical of organizations that intervene in countries under the auspices of peace building or CVE with little knowledge of the context or culture they propose to change.

“It's not with the subject matter expert that knows the local culture, nor in conjunction with the localized NGO they're going to work with. And it's a very, very arrogant, elitist way to approach the situation,” he said, adding that it’s a “very competitive space” and “really largely about money.”

In its mobilization to confront the rise of domestic extremism, the U.S. has replicated many of the mistakes that have characterized the international response to violent extremism, according to Morton. That includes large organizations that have worked internationally but are now pivoting in response to increased funding for domestic programs.

As a starting point, Morton argued, the U.S. government and its partners need to understand that “it's not so much about what you do ‘over there,’ and it's not so much about who ‘they’ are.” Instead, “it's about who we are and what you do over here.”

“What you do domestically, and how the state of your own affairs is running and how your own country is operating, is ultimately crucial to being able to advocate for an international policy that involves peacekeeping, conflict prevention, development, and aid in a way that's going to be effective,” he said.

“The first step is to craft a vision and make sure that vision is not just some idealistic notions about the superiority of democracy and human rights, but to get practices that embody them and to make sure that you don't say what you don't do,” he said.

Devex, with support from our partner GHR Foundation, is exploring the intersection between faith and development. Visit the Focus on: Faith and Development page for more. Disclaimer: The views in this article do not necessarily represent the views of GHR Foundation.