‘Grossly exaggerated’

“I will give that report a three on a scale of one to ten,” Abdullah said on Thursday in Sunday Newsday interview in Chaguanas.

Excepts of the study, which was posted online, was compiled by political scientists Andy Knight and John Mc Coy, after the former’s visit to the alleged site during his stint as Director of the Institute of International Relations at the University of the West Indies, some five years ago.

Knight is currently the head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta, Canada.

In the study, Knight wrote that during his tenure as IIR director he was asked by a Muslim scholar to visit what he claimed was an al-Qaida sleeper cell.

Knight, the study said, also was taken to what appeared to be a “self-sustaining gated community” near to the airport in Trinidad.

“It looked like a normal little Trinidadian village. I didn’t see anything at all unusual, except that there were many women in hijab,” he wrote in the study. Knight said, however, he was told that under the surface, “weapons were stored under the floorboards for military training.” According to the study, Knight and Mc Coy began to take a deeper look at radicalization in TT, realising it was “a hotbed for recruitment to al-Qaida and ISIS.” But on Thursday, Abdullah took issue with the timing of the release of the study and also wondered why Knight was selected to visit the site.

Abdullah told Sunday Newsday he knew of the site but declined to reveal where it was located.

He also claimed there was no cache of weapons as was mentioned in the study.

“There was some attempt to muster up weaponry but the way it sounded in the article was as though they had a cache of weapons which was not entirely true,” he said of the group.

“They were struggling, more or less and there was an attempt to establish a community but nothing really came out of as far as I know.” Saying he was in contact with some of the individuals on the site at the time, Abdullah claimed many of the people mentioned in the study did go to Syria to be a a part of ISIS.

“They were given specific instructions from other quarters of the Muslim community as well and they refused to adhere to those instructions and guidelines,” he said. “For many reasons that I can list on a paper, that situation went wrong.

Those individuals were obviously misguided to a certain extent but I can give them credit for their honesty and sincerity in going abroad and joining ISIS to fight against the aggressors.” The Islam leader said the poor socio- economic conditions in which many of the men existed at the time fuelled their desire to join ISIS.

“Those issues seem to be pushing people away from Trinidad and Tobago. And especially when it comes to Muslims who are looking on and seeing what is happening to their Muslim brothers and sisters overseas and want to assist in whatever way they can with regards to that.” Abdullah said ordinarily, it would have been difficult to raise and send money to help their foreign counterparts, knowing that it may never reach.

“But, what is certain is that if they leave here and they join the group that is fighting against the aggressors, definitely they know that they would have a stake in at least trying to do something about the situation.” Taking issue with Knight’s claim in the study that an estimated 200 people had left to join ISIS, Abdullah said the actual figure could be put at fewer than 100.

He also made it clear that the individuals who left did not return to local shores to commit any crimes. “I want to make that absolutely clear. These individuals have never committed any crimes here,” he said.

“They were before the courts, some of these individuals, for certain crimes.

Those matters were never dealt with to the fullest in the courts so there was no conviction. So, we can’t say for sure if these people were actually guilty of something.” Describing TT as the “flag-bearer of Islam in the West,” Abdullah said while there was a strong Islamic and Muslim presence working in communities “depending on how that is managed, we could see TT surpassing some of our middle- eastern counterparts in terms of establishing Islam in this country.” Abdullah said the Muslim community has an ambitious task ahead.

“The Muslim community has to recognise also that we do stand to attract a lot of people to become Muslims and we do stand in a position to attract radicals as well,” he said.

“Again, I must say that we must be able to manage it, the way we educate, find and position ourselves in the communities to change what is happening.” He added: “If we do not do these things we are going to see the rise of radicalism because we will not be dealing with the real core issues in the society, which is the breakdown of the home, family structure, society and the influx of negative spaces in our communities.

“But, if we have an environment that is conducive to positive growth and we introduce in our communities, positive spaces __ homework centres, sporting centres, areas where people can operate their businesses and develop their skills - these are the things the things we need to incorporate in our societies to drive away the negativity.”