Friday, 13 March 2015

Jake Bilardi: The radicalisation of an Australian teen

The Australian government is investigating unconfirmed reports that an Australian teenage Muslim convert who ran away to join Islamic State (IS) has carried out a suicide attack in Iraq.
Details of casualties were not immediately known. Last year, he talked online to BBC Newsnight's Secunder Kermani.

Jake Bilardi is an 18-year-old Australian Muslim convert from Melbourne, who went under the nom de guerre Abu Abdullah al-Australi. I interviewed him over the internet in December shortly after a photograph of him appeared online, but he asked me back then not to reveal his identity.
He had no idea the photo had been made public, but told me jokingly: "It's out now, I guess to be honest my biggest problem is that it's a bad photo of me, haha."
On a far darker note, he told me that he planned to carry out a suicide attack - and on Wednesday, IS said he had carried a suicide car bombing in Iraq's Anbar province. The Australian government says it is investigating the report.
Propaganda
Bilardi and I spoke over a period of a couple of days in December. He said he was in Ramadi, Iraq, and at that time had spent about four months with IS.
Many of the messages he sent me were typical of the Western IS members I have spoken to - at times sounding like lines from IS propaganda films. He expressed his ideological hatred of the Shias he was fighting in Iraq and justified attacks against his home country.
He told me he didn't want to be drawn into discussing how he had ended up converting to Islam, or about his life in Australia.
He did say that his family "hated Islam", and that he believed all non-Muslims had a deep hatred of the religion. He said that he had always had an interest in politics, and a distrust of international organisations such as the United Nations.
I asked him why, if he thought there were injustices in the world, he didn't seek to resolve them through democratic means. He replied: "Let's be honest you can stand on a street and scream about wanting change and wait maybe 100 years for things to happen or you can grab a gun and fight and change things quickly."
'Hidden cameras'
I found out more about his journey to radicalisation through his account on Yahoo Questions, where users post questions that are answered by member of the public. He was a fairly prolific user, and his questions and answers give an insight into his changing state of mind.
Five years ago, his questions were the usual pretty banal stuff. In one he writes: "Is Russia part of Asia or Europe? Me and my brother were having a debate." Others are about tennis, or the Grand Prix, or Microsoft Word.


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