 We'll get ready. Good. Excellent. Excellent. Okay. So we're going to now begin the first of the scenario sessions. And that requires your attention. You can keep eating what you've got. Before we begin, though, I'd like to welcome Ambassador Alatiba again, those of you who were there last night, Sohim, who is our patron here in making this possible. Thank you very much again. Now, here is how this is going to go. We're going to do a few of these questions just again to sort of set the stage and give you a sense of glimpse into each other's views on this. And then we're going to go to a little mini-deck which will describe the scenario. And then we're going to go right up to the sort of the first move of the scenario. There are just three. It's very simple. And after the first move, there's going to be a 10-minute break where you're not to leave, but to actually interact with one another and to say, given this situation, what will we do? Now, that may mean you interact with the people in your group. It may mean you interact with other groups in your role and say, well, we're the United States. We might want to work with Turkey. Good luck with that, by the way. But you will then go and try those interactions. And then when you come back, you can say, here's what we had in mind. But playing within the rules of the scenario. Now, I know because all of you have strong inquisitive minds full of complex insights that you will look at the scenario and many of you will go, this isn't the way it would happen. Keep it to yourself. Rule number one of scenarios is go with the scenario. We've got the breaks and the panel discussion so we can talk about the context. But here we're just trying to create circumstances which can focus us in on some of these solutions. That's all these are. So just accept them for what they were, kind of action-forcing fictional events. So let's start with the questions. We've got, I think, five just to kick things off. Agree or disagree, Dacia's use of social media has been the single most important tool in their recruitment of foreign fighters. And we'll go from strongly agree down to strongly disagree. This is what we call range question. And the clock should start. You don't even have to wait for me to finish. You can start with the clock. Okay, well that's not terribly helpful, folks. You're all over the place. Okay? So 54% of you strongly agree or agree that the use of social media is their most important recruitment tool. But 28% of you strongly disagree or disagree. So there is some range and some tension that would lead to useful discussion. 18% of you just couldn't make up your minds. All right, next question. Which has been the most effective disuse of social media to recruit foreign fighters? Dissemination of high-quality propaganda materials. That could be by high tech or not. Direct peer-to-peer recruitment or something else. Interesting. Dissemination of high-quality propaganda is 42%. Direct peer-to-peer is 47%. So it's got a bit of an edge. And then there is other. Who said other? Why did you say other? Because I really think it's both. They create a media ecology in which this world view is really accepted in which it has a lot of fans. But then to actually get someone over there, you have to... peer-to-peer recruitment is extraordinarily important. So I think it's the fusion of the two. Combination. Somebody else say other? Anybody else say yes? The ecosystem in which all of this lives. This is not in a vacuum. So it's multifaceted. So the choice needs to be a more integrated, comprehensive understanding. Excellent. Anybody else? We'll come to audience questions a little bit later as we get into this. Anybody? All right. Next. Which dish recruitment narrative has the most powerful draw? The push to establish a caliphate? The excitement and adventure of Jihad? Opportunities to defend Sunnis from Shia oppression for combating the brutality of the Assad regime or five other. Okay. Again, a bit of a spread. The push to establish the caliphate has the lead here. Although it was mentioned several times in the conversation this morning. So I think there may have been some campaigning for it. And excitement adventure of Jihad is next. Interestingly, very few felt combating the brutality of the Assad regime fueled it. Who said other? Jocelyn, Farah. Farah, you seem to be very contrary. I'd like to be that. Okay, good. Well, we'll come to you in a second. Jocelyn. I think the most helpful part of the narrative is to tell people that Islam is in danger and that they have to fight for it. It's not about specific phrasing about the caliphate or the Jihad or the local circumstances. It's like presenting the fact that Islam is a threat and that's what motivates people, especially the foreign fight. Thank you, Farah. Again, I think that what we tend to do is try to put everything into boxes so that we can understand it very simply. And so I'm rejecting the idea that it's one thing or the other because experience has shown me that indeed it's a multifaceted feeling. It's emotional as well as psychological. There are lots of dimensions to this. So when we put it in this phrase, that's why I keep putting other. It is complicated. Okay, however, the phrase is most powerful. And the reason is we know it's several things. The question is try to pushing people towards finding one that may have precedence. Because again, if it's several things, you may not be able to actually take action against all of them. But the question doesn't talk about region and the question doesn't talk about particular state actors. And so it depends on who you're asking, which is why it is important to understand that the Zanzibarian and the Norwegian are not going to have the same draw, but they're also going to all be interested in ISIS. Okay. Anybody else with an other? Yes. I think fundamentally their message comes down to we're strong. I mean, there's multiple aspects to it. But one of the reasons that they're so eager to use brutality is that it demonstrates their strength. That's why they're not bothered by it. And if their message of strength erodes, then ultimately they could experience a brand reversal the same way that their predecessor Al Qaeda interrupted. Brutality went from being a message of its strength to a message of how it overplayed its end. Okay. Next question. We have two more? Okay. What is the largest domestic factor pushing foreign recruits to Daesh in prominently Muslim countries? Lack of economic opportunities, security state crackdown on Islamists, political marginalization, or other? Okay. Again, other leads the way here. Political marginalization and lack of economic opportunities tie with state crackdowns lagging substantially. Who says other that isn't one of the... I mean, I can imagine that you, both of yours would apply here as well. So we'll stipulate that. Jim. David, it gets back to the same motivation that we looked at after 9-11 where we took a look at most of the people involved in the actual attacks and we applied one, two, and three to them and we said we just don't think that that's really... It isn't push factors as much as it is, at least in those cases, pull factors of the ideology, of the religion, of the sense of identity and the sense of shame at the identity being unrespected and such that... Disrespected that tends to get people into this more than one, two, and three, which, and I'll get into this later, one, two, and three, of course, are things we can kind of, we think, fix or at least try to fix, whereas the other is very hard to fix. Slightly simpler answer, but a lack of a social, authentic place in their own society. Both of these, though, echo, right? I just want to feel better about myself. How will I feel better about myself? Will it be for a theological reason? Will it be for an action? But they're looking for some kind of a new mission or an improvement in their circumstance, yes. It's interesting that the other category has generated more and more responses because I, like others, probably saw that as all of the above plus other factors. Okay. I can cite a couple of other factors that my drive domestically saw these fathers to the battlefield. One would be the perception that the government is not Islamic enough and they want to go to a caliphate and live under an authentic Islamic government. Okay. And by the way, these are multiple-choice questions. Right? I mean, they have limitations. The idea is to just crystallize thinking. Here, Manal. I think in addition to all of the above, the other factor is just what I would say the daily grind. I mean, the amount of corruption, the amount of humiliation, the amount that people have to go through in a lot of these contexts, particularly those that are in transition and conflict, but even the more stable, the more people to suddenly care about their identity. I think it's dangerous to see the identity as a driving factor. Identity only becomes important when it's threatened and when you're humiliated. So those factors that lead to identity becoming such an issue I think is one of the primary factors on the domestic front. Yeah, there's also something which I sometimes call the stability tipping point in a society. And to me, the stability tipping point in many societies is when there is a sense within a population that working within the system actually will serve them versus working outside the system. If the majority of the people feel that they should work within the system, it tends to be fairly stable. If at a growing number of people feel that they have to work outside the system in order to gain their lives, then that produces instability. Yes? You know, I think we have to distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions. I think that the, if you look at the two, if you look at the kids who went and attacked at Bardo in Tunis, he had a brother who decided not to do this sort of thing. He led a completely different life. What distinguished the young attacker in the case of Bardo was he had the opportunity to train on the Libyan border. So the collapse of states, the collapse of borders, the capacity to take advantage of alienation or to have alienation channel in a certain direction is really the sufficient condition. It creates the opportunity to take somebody who's unhappy, distraught, and turn that person into a combatant. So these structural conditions, I think, are absolutely fundamental. Okay. One or two more quick comments. I actually saw number two and three as variations on the theme. If you have security state crackdown on Islamists, that turns into and manifests in political marginalization. I think political marginalization, you could actually define much more broadly than we typically do to include, you know, if you talk about the polity, include social marginalization. If you look at social and political marginalization, everything else fits into that umbrella. Okay. I think that what pushes away these records from there on societies is a sense of alienation and lots of hope that it can be different, that it can be changed. And this sense of alienation is the result of many factors. The religious one, the economic one, the political one, and I think that it is extremely difficult to say which of them is more significant. Thank you. The last question. What is the largest domestic factor pushing foreign recruits to Daesh in Western countries? Perceive Western indifference, the Assad regime's atrocities, struggle of Muslims to integrate economically and politically. Anti-Muslim sentiment, is there something else that you think is driving them in Western societies to go and seek a role in this? So, 31% on struggle of Muslims to integrate economically and politically, and almost the same in anti-Muslim sentiment. Now, another, let's set aside alienation. Let's set aside the theological motivation that we've talked about before. Let's set aside the opportunities created by the disruptions in societies which have come up several times. What else other than those others? Yes, Mary. That personal search for meaning. Yeah, I mean, I think there's an entire psychosocial issue with, you know, teenagers, girls and boys, similar to what we have, gang and culture recruitment, you know, in different places. I think, can't forget that. It's a more generic one. Okay. Anything else? Yes. The fact that they are living in largely functional societies but looking back on largely dysfunctional societies in their home region, and I think compelled to try and change that in some way. If it is their home region, yes. Well, I call the lack of symbolic integration which is more than economic, social or political, which is to feel part of the national narrative of the country in which you live. Okay. Which is alienation in another form. Alienation because it means that the counterpart which are the political institution have to make an effort to include. It's not about alienation. It's about enlarging what is the national narrative of the country. No, but the people are feeling alienated and one needs to enlarge the national narrative to bring them in, yes. All right. So those are the five questions to team this up. If we could switch over to the slides and move quickly into that before we get to the slides, do either of you have anything you want to say in response to any of these questions or any of what you've heard? I think we always tend to find or at least search for what we think is the one reason everyone joins ISIS or the one reason that they feel alienated and I think it's like a lot of the feedback I heard, there is no one reason. There's probably 10 or 12 or 15 and everyone has a reason why they think it's better for him to join Daesh than it is to be part of a national country with borders and a flag. Trying to find the one reason and therefore fix it sometimes doesn't work. Yesterday, one of the questions in the dinner was, well, how do we prevent radicalization? I think the simple answer is to prevent, to present a better alternative. To present a better narrative is to make sure that there is a choice for him other than Daesh that seems or at least appears more attractive and I think that's the way the UAE looks at counter radicalization is to create a society where people feel empowered, feel part of the country and feel like if they stay in the UAE their future is going to be better than if they join Daesh. Do you want to add anything? You know, I think that the conversation has really reinforced how important it is to get specific because of the complexity, the importance of context, the nuance and you know, both Steve, Hadley and Manal talked about the particulars of living in a very difficult transitional environment with the daily grind of corruption and humiliation. I know that we've got a guest here from Somalia who has that very much on her mind and as we look at struggling with these issues taking it into a very particular issue which I think your teen us up for really becomes critical so that we don't get lost in the complexity. Exactly and clearly the purpose of this is get a temperature get a sense of what's on people's minds and what do they think top issues are but as we've said in the opening last night and as we said this morning there's no one approach we joked at the beginning and I said I know where we're going to end up there is a spectrum of choices to use the structure Catherine brought up earlier there's a range of times to intervene there's a range of ways to intervene there's a range of areas to intervene there's a range of themes it differs country by country you have to use all of them but again that gets us to the point I made earlier about complexity being the enemy of action with the mind boggles you've got to sort of start someplace and so setting some priorities helps us with that that's the purpose of doing it but let's do it a different way let's do it in the scenario context now this is not technically a war game with multiple moves and all the complexity that some of you have been in war games before may be familiar with it's a simplified version where we're going to essentially describe a situation circumstance we need developments within that circumstance and use those to catalyze discussion and search for ideas and this is where we really want to move from the abstract discussion to what would work here what could we do here to advance the idea of peace broadly of countering violent extremism specifically countering violent extremism in this circumstance specifically so the title is what if they gave a war and nobody came commanding the virtual high ground and other strategies for preventing and defeating information age insurgencies there are a couple of setup slides here let's go to the first of them just to give you a sense the foreign fighter presence is growing as of early 2015 the number of foreign fighters to have joined the Syrian Iraq conflict has surpassed 20,000 as we heard Tom say last night the latest number is perhaps 25,000 some of the estimates have been even bigger foreign fighter countries of origin listed here Tunisia leads the list Saudi Arabia is second, Morocco Jordan, Russia and France interestingly all have roughly the same number of foreign fighters contributed Lebanon has 900 56% of the fighters come from the Middle East and North Africa 19% from Western Europe 14% from the former Soviet Union and 11% from other countries by the way we'll give you these slides if you don't already I think you have them in your notebook correct are the slides in the notebook if you don't we'll give them to you anyway the next slide so Daesh recruits through sophisticated campaign they leverage social media they've created highly successful online recruitment campaigns and they've used a number of factors to pull people towards them one is the brutality of Assad one is the sectarian battle another is kind of 5 star Jihad you know compared to some of these others they portray the conflict in Syrian Iraq as an exciting adventure where you can even have a good quality of life in the midst of it and then of course they touch upon historic and religious implications these are themes that recur in some of the tools that they've been using they've had quite a successful social media recruitment effort using popular social media sites to allow them to infiltrate and influence the consciousness of young people Tom Donlan mentioned this last night and one of the areas that we're going to want to obviously address this is through that next obviously factors at home as we've discussed push people towards it there's youth unemployment Middle East North Africa youth unemployment is 22% for men, 39% for women there's security state crackdowns in some places you have political marginalization that we've talked about or alienation in western countries you have perceived indifference to west to the Assad regime the sense of otherness that we talked about a minute ago you've got anti-muslim sentiment 52% of the people in Spain have negative opinion of Muslims 50% in Germany 38% in France those are seriously negative conditions and frankly the turmoil can exacerbate it migration flows and other things can exacerbate it the next one okay so the next thing is going to be our first move again these are fictional moves they're not intended to represent anything that's actually happened they're designed to catalyze all of you into action and take it for nothing we're not endorsing them we're not predicting them we're simply using them as a tool okay next so the first of these is widespread barrel bombing by the Syrian government is met with inaction by the security council the statement they say well we think this is terrible but we don't do anything about it and so the goal here is to determine how the international community can combat the perception of indifference in the eyes of the communities that are vulnerable to radicalization and recruitment this is obviously a broader it's a luster of a broader issue things happen bad things happen it could be barrel bombing that's the Syria conflict writ large where there's brutality and we don't respond to that the West doesn't respond to it broadly and so this gives an opportunity to recruit it gives an opportunity to say they don't care it's up to us we need to deal with this or their lack of action is a sign that they just want to kill each other however it's characterized and so now the question becomes how do you combat that how do you combat that particular kind of message and so as Nancy said let's get specific in this move address this issue from the perspective of your organization now Al Qaeda is probably not going to counteract it you're going to try to take advantage of it so the question in your case would be how do you take advantage of it and the business interest would be how do you deal with that so does anybody have any questions so it is now about 25 after 10 I really would just like you to take 5 or 10 minutes don't go far away this is not a time to check your email all of you I know none of you will follow that guidance but in 10 minutes we're going to get back together and we're going to dive right in with this and then move on to the next move and I'll give you a 3 minute warning if you've got an idea where you can coordinate the United States can coordinate with somebody or wants to reach out to the telecom industry reach out to them create that kind of cross-pollination and we'll see you in 10 minutes or so ladies and gentlemen we'll begin again in 3 minutes we'll begin again in 3 minutes in the world exactly we're going to guys guys we're going to we're going to begin in a moment we're going to begin in 1 minute 1 minute alright ladies and gentlemen if you could resume your seats please thank you very much there's only one group here this being uncooperative but I'm not going to socially shame you alright okay everybody thank you very much I hope you've had a productive brief conversation because we are discussing social media here I'm not going to say this throughout the day I just want to say it now to give you a sense that we practice what we preach or you practice what we preach Peace Game is the number one topic trending on Twitter in Washington, D.C. right now so that's positive it's ahead of Amtrak Stop Fast Track Stop Fast Track TPP Wearing Orange, don't know what that's about Cuba Growth Anna Ivanovich Chopin Reference Ron Warren Run Nick Young Rick Scott More Happy Than Not I hope all of you are more happy than perhaps that's all of you as well in any event so the question is how do you respond to this and what's the first reaction and I'm going to ask everybody to you know say raise your hand but I'm going to go to a couple people first and as is always the case in these things you should be ready to respond and I think what I'm going to do first because of the nature of who we are and what we're doing is I'm going to go first to Daesh and then Al Qaeda and then open it up to the rest of the group but when you see that what do you do we have a media team already deployed what we're going to do is undertake provocative attacks against Assad's forces with the goal of having them come out and try to pursue us when they do we'll have larger forces that are ready to surround Assad soldiers kidnap them and then we're going to produce an excellent video one which will show the barrel bombing juxtaposed by the execution of the Assad forces to show that the caliphate is at the forefront of taking revenge for such heinous attacks we also anticipate that to compete with us other rebel groups will also undertake an offensive when they do we anticipate that the forces of Assad are going to try to withdraw back towards Damascus when they do that we're going to capture other sites as we did with Palmyra okay despite the fact that you're yesterday's terrorist organization how will you respond we're in it for the long game so al-Qaeda has actually got a much better stronghold closer to Damascus than ISIS does so in many respects ISIS needs al-Qaeda at this point in order to effect any kind of power struggle against the Assad regime however al-Qaeda is also looking to get more recruits and gain more in financial support so part of our goal here is to play against of course the western infidels that are allowing this to happen in addition to pointing out that ISIS isn't doing anything to protect the actual community and the civilians in the area they're not doing anything to help with Syrians we're actually going to go in and help the community provide some logistics food water in addition to attacking the Assad regime and possibly capturing more territory closer to Damascus okay so this is what's happening this is what's being fed out into the network and we're starting to sort of see reactions to all of this on the ground now let me go to the NGOs that are on the ground then I'm going to come to some of you here here you guys are on the ground you're seeing this just what are you seeing in response to all of this and how are you responding to it so it's not a perception of indifference it is in fact indifference to the suffering of the Syrian people the barrel bombs and other of course terrible weapons of mass destruction so first obviously the NGOs it's not our agenda to counter the indifference for western nations that's not why we're there we're impartial we're neutral we do think that increased humanitarian assistance is very important it also needs to be widespread it can't just be to for instance or areas of the country where the assistance that can go in can somehow the funding can somehow be traced in a way that suits donor governments meaning that it has been siphoned off to you know basically extremist groups which is going to happen no matter what and that's the reality local groups should be more involved so they shouldn't be local actors local Syrian actors who work on humanitarian assistance they need to be involved in the planning they need to be part of the meetings but in fact seen as actors who have capacity and the ability to serve their own communities they're in their own communities and by seeing them be empowered that's very important I think for the whole community finally the social services has been raised will be provided by someone inside of Syria to some extent and if it's not humanitarian actors then it's going to be some sort of militant organization more than likely and so that's another vacuum and that's another opportunity to create loyalty in places that people may not want so funding, humanitarian action making sure human rights violations are documented and that the media is also providing a platform for it okay so what I would really like to get is you know reactions that are coming of this dealing with how this is spreading or how you might counteract it yes okay so first of all you know we are at the front lines of this fight is this you speaking as Bashar al-Assad himself I think you know who I am but I'm happy that you said my name twice don't wear it out we are fighting the dirty fight that many people around the table don't want to say they want but do want us to do we have the support around this table of countries we know who they are we know who they are we know who they are and they tell us behind the scenes and they are collaborating with us to confront Daesh these attacks killed Daesh rebels, terrorists, al-Qaeda whatever you want to call them these are the people who want to destroy Western civilization who want to destroy Islamic civilization and we can have the media propaganda we can have the NGOs who are being fed by local activists on the ground propaganda at the end of the day look at what's happened in the last three years you said al-Qaeda is dead well they are being supported by our friends Turkey and Saudi Arabia to take over the north part of our country right now so thank you Saudi Arabia and Turkey you brought back al-Qaeda that's what's happening so we can have a discussion here about Daesh we are fighting them but thank you very much by the way, that's a response to violent extremism it may not be the one you want it may actually not be one that actually is an effective response but that is one that is being articulated and Barbara here wants to in a completely uncoordinated way with the government in Damascus speak from the perspective of the government in Tehran hello Bashar it's your good friend Qasem Soleimani I want to echo everything you said I think the last few years have shown us exactly what the alternative to the central government the legitimate central government of Syria is it's a bunch of murderous extremists as we have seen with Daesh we are supporting the government in Damascus financially and with military support we are training our generals have been killed in Syria trying to defend the legitimate regime against the violent extremists that are supported by Saudi Arabia Turkey and others we have of course the support of local shia we have helped to encourage the formation of many small militia groups in Syria to defend our sanctuaries there and we have encouraged of course Hezbollah and Lebanon to cross the border and support the legitimate government of Syria against these murderous thugs but there is also a political dimension to what we would like to see as you may recall Iran was prevented from taking part in Geneva II discussions by the Saudis the UN invited us and then disinvited us and I think my colleague to say about a political solution in Syria we are not at a political solution in Syria we are just responding to this particular circumstance and I will, thank you so much the Iranian government from the beginning of this conflict has been seeking a political resolution and as we have mentioned we see that atrocities are happening on the ground and we continue to stress that there is only a political solution the hypocrisy of the UN Security Council in even attempting to make a statement about barrel bombs while ignoring what is happening right now to the Yemeni population by the Syrian aggression with US-made armaments I hope the Saudi aggression against the Yemenis I hope this feels good but look I love the play acting and you are doing a great job but we are going to sort of move towards the response I'm going to ask for one more local response and then I'm going to sort of widen it out we've heard from Tehran we've heard from the Syrian government I do want to get what the local Sunni reaction is and then I'm going to open it out a little bit to other governments speaking in the name of the people who are actually barrel bombs we are not talking about the exception of indifference we are talking about actual indifference that's killing us every day and it's all the more shocking that these planes that are barrel bombing us are actually operating alongside the US Air Force and the forces of other countries it's happening exactly in these regions where the coalition is operating and with regard to violent extremism this does not make us more supportive of Daesh because anyway Daesh does not defend us they're not fighting for us they have their own project more than often they're helping the regime as we see now in Aleppo but whether you like it or not Al-Qaeda is helping us actually they're fighting, they're dying for us it doesn't mean we agree whether this thing they do and the kind of model of governance they're promoting in Syria is something we dislike I mean we've been we did an uprising four years ago so the kind of model they promote is certainly not what we want but if barrel bombs continue like this we will be neither willing nor able to try to check Al-Qaeda's ambitions in Syria we're not willing because why would we oppose the only people who actually do something for us when the rest of the world is watching and able simply because as you know these barrel bombs they displace people and that's my last point but the most effective check on these jihadi ambitions of governance is to have vibrant, strong organized local communities local administration, local council and so on so you know what you have to do we want on the fly zone to put it clearly so you've requested on the fly zone but let me say this we have 20-25 minutes to do it and we'd like to get people as many people as possible to join and you won't all get it into each one but we'd like to have a focus on the actions you may take next to sort of counter the spread I think we've talked about some you know sort of the root bubbling up of how an action like this may lead to recruitment efforts now we'd like to talk about how to counter it and what the responses may be in an effort to be not US centric I will turn to the EU known for their swift action and almost everything but go ahead thank you we're the European Union we'd like firstly to note the suffering of the peoples of Syria and Iraq in the current forms of conflict and we would therefore like to request to send in European Union observers to ascertain the facts on the ground and in partnership with that and alongside the United Nations and their facilitation we would like to invite Iran, Russia to dialogue with us the European Union in order to look at a sustainable future for Iraq and Syria and on that note we would also like to invite local civil society groups within the European Union to engage with our foreign policy actions through dialogue at the European Union level wow how effective do you think that's going to be so I think it's problematic to involve Iran in trying to come up with a resolution to the Syrian conflict since you know they're a big part of the problem itself so for the UAE we'd register obviously our outrage disappointment at again the Security Council's failure to address the problem in Syria but more importantly against discussions involving Iran and Russia as if we can get a solution through working with them we'd like to work with our friends the Saudis and the Egyptians trying to come up with a regional response to this problem that highlights our concerns okay does Saudi Arabia or Egypt want to respond to this so Saudi Arabia's verbal responses that were increasingly disappointed in the continued ineffectiveness of the international community to combat the brutal Assad regime and attacks like this that target civilians so our action is to work with the UAE to work with Egypt but what we will actually be doing is continuing to increase our funding to the opposition groups hi Saudi just saying hi over here she thinks she's the opposition group you mean by the way she make the check out to Leanne Egypt well Egypt has been very consistent over a number of years and we've supported the idea of a political transition in Syria and this latest outbreak of violence reinforces that position we think it's critically important to bring in appropriate opposition members and to be responsible in the way that both sides engage in a political transition in Syria okay so now we've got some discussion about the political pardon me who said thank you Egypt we appreciate your involvement alright thanks you wanted to do you want to make a point about a potential response that you think well I'm just curious what the impact on this security council in action what the impact of a massive humanitarian response is and how the various players who does the massive humanitarian response okay okay thanks um so let's unpack that a little bit okay this event has taken place the security council isn't doing anything just how massive is your humanitarian response in Syria to these victims well we've deployed considerable resources in the region on the borders of Syria and are providing a tremendous amount of humanitarian assistance already we are speaking with the NGO community to leverage the resources that they have and we've also spoken to our friends in the media to ensure that the tremendous amount of work that our dedicated staff are doing in very dangerous and trying circumstances is well covered and given the credit that it deserves so Nancy this sounds to me like there is no humanitarian response no I think that the question I have for a number of our colleagues here is why why isn't that having any impact what he said was we deployed on the borders there's no response in the country there's nothing new there's nothing new and it's media spun that's not what I heard I think that's a misinterpretation of my statement okay so what's new we do have a very limited presence I believe on the ground in Syria not my area of expertise and primary humanitarian assistance obviously is in more peaceful environment so across the border away from the fighting in response to situations like this where we can deploy more resources we do I would note after the Grisha attack in Kenya one of the responses of the Kenyan government was demanding the closure of a refugee camp that is run by the United Nations and we push back very strongly against that understanding that it was only likely to make things worse okay we'll take that for what it is well we have a much broader response which the ambassador will test to in a moment but on the humanitarian assistance side immediately we would obviously be working we're working very closely with our partners in the United Nations with our NGOs who are already on the ground who are on the front lines we're mobilizing our resources through the office of foreign disaster assistance and we're dialoguing across the international community and within the NSC in order to have a much more robust response given the security council statement your twitter ratings might take a dive as you listen to the US response to this first of all we've done a lot of coordinating we've shoved back to go along with the dialog exactly we have we've told the Turks no way to the no-fly zone implementation UN folks wanted us to think about a red line even the UN and we didn't like that because we're against military force we looked at options with the intelligence community to increase eyes on also we need to coordinate with the NGO community but again with the intelligence community we don't want anything to go bang over or on Syria nonetheless we'll do that we're going to condemn this thing terribly we're going to issue a statement of regret that the UN Security Council didn't join us in this condemnation due to unmentioned states not allowing that to happen but the problem we have in our internal deliberations in the US government is how do we pitch this in our anti-ISIS anti-violent extremism because it looks like we're not taking any action when you have horrible events happening in the Middle East so what we will cite is we're against Muslims dying we're going to help with humanitarian assistance we're going to stay seized with this and we're going to hope that some other event will come up and this one will go away because one puts us on the horns of a dilemma because we really don't want to do anything active because of our other equities Iran negotiations our unwillingness to get involved in Syria on the one hand yet we realize this is a good recruiting tool for ISIS and al Qaeda and violent extremism generally so we feel we need to do something about it even if that's not very much okay can the people of South Carolina respond to this please they must three quick points on behalf of the voters of the great state of South Carolina first the fact that we were 20 minutes into this conversation before we even heard from the United States is I believe a symbol of the abdication of leadership the abject failure of leadership that has brought us to this moment in the Middle East the second point I would make is this is a moment that demands leadership and we need to be serious about this we need to recognize that these problems are not going to solve ourselves and I would say to our friends in the region you're going to criticize us if we sit on the sidelines and you're going to criticize us if we act well I would rather be on the side of action and I think finally we need to recognize that going forward the United States is going to have to play its role its rightful role in the world if we want to live in a safer world and solve these problems thank you thank the gentlemen for healing thank you thank you senator Graham and that may explain exactly why you are where you are in the polls let's hear 30 seconds each western muslim community turkey business interest and then very quickly back to you guys but very quickly yes so I think it's totally typical that you look to civil society so far down the discussion why were you not asking about the impact of this this is turning on the moderator it's a scenario I'm looking at my colleagues around the table having a conversation about what state actors should do when in fact it's western muslims that are moving to join the ranks of ISIS so this is part of the conspiracy theory you don't care about muslims this is typical the usual voiceless lay muslims in the west they are appalled I would say by the current state of discussion of these issues and muslims in the west do not feel taken care of because what is at stake for us is a sense of justice it is not so much state interest and the more the sense of justice and fairness and dehumanization of some conflicts the more we are indeed attracted by people across the table who give us a strong positive quote-unquote or helpful way of dealing with that and our hope would be to have a more neutral or supranational entity where we could have a discussion because if I shift my face and I am now a muslim leader in Europe I am trying to reach out to the EU for example to create different way of foreign policy on these issues and until now unfortunately we have failed this is exactly where this thing this first session appropriately ends up and I know a lot of people want to jump in and I am just going to ask you to hold off ten minutes and jump in in the second section because essentially what you saw unfold here was a development a set of response by those who could capitalize on the development essentially moderate inaction on the part of those who could have done something to develop a counter narrative and then the response of the alienated who might be recruitable saying we are ready now our goal here is not to recapitulate what is actually happening our goal here is to come up with solutions that might actually counteract it and try to identify ways to get to places we haven't gone yet and so one of the traps in these videos is that you say well my government hasn't done anything so therefore I won't do anything and so then we sort of relive life and that's not something so what I am really going to encourage you to do in each of these next steps is to say what might happen that could shake lose some action I think Nancy brought up the issue you know a big humanitarian response would actually resonate and the question is how do you get to that how do you get to that with the players I know the tech community wanted to weigh in and will get to you in the course the next one there are ways that there might be a response there there are intelligence responses that we might have in this we will explore the law enforcement responses that we may have in this and I want to explore those in the next one but I think in this first one we've achieved the goal of recapitulating what's actually sort of happening and what I really want to move us towards in each of the next ones is to figure out because clearly we've got this problem and we're not solving the problem so let's go to the next move and the next move is police arrest 20 Muslims following student protests in Italy well this is what just happened there were people in the community which we just described they start protesting because they students were decrying western inaction following the recent bombings it's amazing that we were able to predict this outcome and so they protest and now the situation is ratcheting up a little bit and the question is what can we do towards diffusing the situation and developing strategies to pre-empt the flow of recruits out of Italy and elsewhere in western Europe how do you work to promote the flow how do others work whether in intelligence or in law enforcement or in the government or in the media or in the tech community to counteract the flow to come up with something constructive we're going to take 10 minutes which will put us right at 11 15 so take time work it out and let's focus on constructive steps that can be taken, thank you two minute warning we're going to begin again in two minutes okay ladies and gentlemen can I encourage you to return to your seats all right so here we are and what we want to do in this section is talk about now that we've had a development an international development the barrel bombing and there was a response to that development to take advantage of it by extremist groups and not a particularly strong response in order to counter it from others and so now it's more important than ever that we actually find concrete steps that can be taken to counter violent extremism and I think in illustration of how that works in the real world and what we need to change comes from the example that Nancy brought up and so maybe Nancy want to talk about it for a second well just very briefly that was a very illustrative session in that it underscored the inaction that was available to us through the security council and it gets to Tom Donilon's comment last night a dysfunction among the great powers in the ability to coordinate and move towards solutions in the absence of that there was in fact significant western action around humanitarian response and probably one of the largest most massive most expensive humanitarian response was in Izbin undertaken in Syria with half of global UN appeals going to the Syria crisis right now and yet that doesn't register per the slide that talks about the sense of western indifference and for obvious reasons when you're still being killed by barrel bombs but it goes to this critical issue of when you don't have the tools that you can legally take and you reach for the ones that you can and they don't register and you continue on with the narrative of western indifference it provides it yet a different set of conundrums for action right and so as we look here we see we've seen this movie the question is if a lot is being done and that could be turned into a positive narrative what do you have to do to turn it into a positive narrative that's the question for us and that's a narrow one right one is you could promote it better that might resonate to some degree it might not or you might say well it's not resonating because frankly the bombing is still going on so you actually have to take some action so that people say well gee they're not just doing this they're also doing that and it resonates more and that could be a step and even if you know there are steps between total inaction and all out war right and so even on the military side if you can't achieve peace without some kinetic action then we have to have that in our plan right I mean even though our goal is peace we have to recognize that and frankly it's a credibility issue in this and it's going to come up again so I think Nancy brings up a good point because it gets us a little bit there but let me go back to European Union now because this is happening in Europe and I'm going to go to you then I'm going to go to law enforcement in Europe and then I want to go to the intelligence community and say in this context what do you do to avoid this turning into a new stream of people flowing into these regions so we would more security advice, police advisors we would turn to a U-Best practice model which is situated in Denmark in Arhus with experts in putting this right they can deal with young angry cowards also with young Muslim angry cowards so we would turn to them and look to their expertise and draw on their expertise and in that way I think we would have immediate access to the young and could follow up with innovative community policy strategies so we just happen to have since you mentioned Arhus we just happen to have here the guy is responsible for that it's a big it's very convenient but so Jurgen or you and Georgia perhaps you may want to address this it's been very disappointing to listen to all these very interesting high political discussions because it doesn't really bring us forward in a solution of the problems so I'm representing both myself and my police district all police commissioners in Europe in looking for ways to solve this and we didn't really hear any solutions when we heard what the different countries were talking about okay well what the police agencies should do by themselves and collaborating with the EU and bilaterally first of all there's an intelligence question you have to of course be aware of vulnerable communities extreme Muslim communities if you haven't already created contact groups between the intelligence and leading Muslim figures leading Imams in your countries you should create some of these contact groups in order to raise the understanding in the Muslim societies extreme Muslim societies in order to be able to influence so this is on a more national intelligence level on the local level that's where I work you have to use community policing strategies it's important to stress that the police like much of the other social society has an important role in addressing this problem so what we should do within the police community policing strategies is that we should take contact to the Muslim local Muslim societies local Muslim youth centers local Imams and open the discussion what is going on and what is your perspective on what we've seen in Syria and Italy open up for the discussion in some way express that we understand your anger of course we are all more or less angry with what's going on we are unsatisfied and then again try to show another path tell them what are the what can you do within our democratic society within our legal framework how can you protest without crossing the line to become a violent extremist could you perhaps join the European Red Cross or something if you wanted to make a difference in humanitarian perspective so those are the concrete actions we talk like the countries do we act and those are positive steps do you also identify people who are a potential threat do you arrest people what other steps do you take Georgia as international police advisors here what we understand is how we do what we do is as important as what we're doing so that we're not actually contributing to the problem and actually fueling the problems and the unrest how we do community policing how we manage crowd and protests is very important and then we have to do that in a transparent and a just and responsible and accountable way and we understand that and that is the sort of ethos of policing that we would like to encourage whether it's in Tunis or in Copenhagen okay the intelligence community was invoked here by the EU as well and clearly there is some connection here between crowds of people and identifying people who might be extremists and identifying people who might be moving forward what can constructively be done here as well I'm not used to seeing the light of day but with that I'll do it my best to represent I would just like to point out that the intelligence community informs the policy we're not the policy makers the reason why I mention that is that we will defer to the government as they make the policy I had a bell I would be ringing it right now we are very alarmed with what we're seeing in the communities we for years now have had concerns with certain threat groups that information has been reported up but it's not been acted upon if you want information about what's going on in the communities it takes time to develop those networks and to build those networks and to build those relationships it's not something that happens overnight it's not instant no matter what technology is involved whether it's communication or not communication is two ways someone's putting out a message and someone wants to receive it as long as you have those two options that communication will occur some of the solutions that we're hoping that the government we can work with is to kind of think outside of the box when you're making recommendations and policy recommendations we're asking to bring the intelligence community to the table when those are being made we see that often something else that we would like to do is remember that these bad actors if we call them are threat groups are working with intelligence communities it's just not the one that your government is working with if they can build those relationships we challenge people in the NGO community local citizens religious community state to also work with the intelligence community because those bad actors in your area are also doing that and our approach is something that we're very very interested in and we'd like to work with some of those groups to better surface some of the intelligence information to help law enforcement and our policy makers do that okay telecom community IT community clearly you're playing a role in this and the IC has been working with IT what do you suggest well I'd like to remind government the intelligence community and perhaps most specifically law enforcement that we have the capacity to monitor public discourse in a way that's well beyond your capacity and so we are of course open for business in that regard are you are you open for business in that regard will you work with them will you share this information will you shut it down what will you do well we're a very multifaceted technology well on the one hand an organization like Twitter or Facebook or some consumer facing organizations may be reticent at least to discuss publicly the ways in which they'll share that information I think it's clear that they will but I think it's also important to note that many of this information much of this information is already public so if you're an organization more like Palantir we're obviously willing and able to consume that data and we're willing to share that information with the community and law enforcement so as law enforcement was discussing identifying individuals who may be at risk or may be marginalized potential for communicating and aligning themselves with bad actors these are people that we can identify based on the way that they engage with social media not perhaps to take to increase surveillance but perhaps just to initiate a conversation if that's the end goal of the information at scale that we can provide and I think frankly we're also often overlooked or come to us when a decision's already been made as opposed to using the tactical intelligence that we can provide to inform the action in the first place I think we're at an absolutely critical juncture in our discussion here which needs to be flagged the nature of the threat we're talking about unlike past threats cannot be dealt with by governments alone it requires public-private collaboration of a sort that may make some people uncomfortable but it requires the police working with the local Muslim communities both to help present an alternative narrative but also to gain intelligence it requires the intelligence community working with them it requires the intelligence community and the police and governments working with the IT community who have much more information about who these people are and what they're doing and what they're saying and who they're relating to than exist elsewhere this requires a kind of it requires as was noted earlier the NGOs to play a role in this that is not the role that people have typically played but there is no role when one is dealing with a non-state threat or there's no initiative when dealing with a non-state threat that doesn't involve some degree of this kind of expanded public-private partnership which is new territory and uncomfortable for a lot of reasons for people to deal with Tony you represent part of the private sector as you know I'm the CEO of a major multinational corporation and I am a little...in your dreams you don't know that I am really struck by the cacophony of confusion that I hear in this conversation do you know the guy from South Carolina you sound a lot like him well I do and I will actually pose a question to him but on the telecom side I want to pick up where my colleagues left off we're brought to the table we as the private sector after decisions are made language on public-private partnerships which is a new tool in a 21st century tool box is a good tool but our government colleagues whether they're in Europe or in the Middle East or in the US don't know how to use it don't have defined roles and responsibilities clearly and are really dissipating a very important tool Farah talked about the ecosystem we're tiptoeing around the ecosystem our intelligence colleagues say there are alarm bells I have alarm bells in this region they're not being protected I'm thinking about pulling out in some places that will have a downward spiral in an already fragile environment give me some tools in my toolbox how are you going to incentivize me to stay and to remain engaged I will end with a positive note since we are searching for solutions yes on the technology side and on my own business interest we know the world of business and we have many partners in the region we're doing what we're doing because we see the value of engaging in this region and the huge opportunities for growth but frankly our government colleagues are not making it easy and I'd like to put the question to them what are you going to do for us how are you going to incentivize give me some clarity Mr. Ambassador well ok we'll turn to them and then I'll come back to you but I had a conversation once with a senior official in the Jordanian government and talking about long term stability in Jordan and I said what's the key to long term stability in Jordan and he said oh that's simple 6 to 7 million jobs and so this is in terms of you know can something constructive be done there so turn to the US government put the point again not with I don't want to recapitulate past inaction but what is possible in the area of the public-private partnership we talked about what would you do to work with the IT sector what would you do to work with the local Muslim communities what would you do to work with the business community are there specific steps you would take in these circumstances that might not have been tried but you think might be possible yeah based upon your urging us and all of our friends around this table to think outside the box of current policy we've thought among ourselves that aside from the usual coordination that I went into in boring detail before and talking to everybody one thing the US government can do is to in taking another look at the crises you have given the humanitarian disaster that's a good pivot point to look at policy again and decide maybe we should take a more active role both diplomatically and militarily and in terms of assistance humanitarian and other in the Syrian situation to try to send a message that we do care about that region we are engaged in it that has downsides in terms of combating violent extremism but in terms of dealing with the worries of the intelligence community and the downward spiral that would be generated if global business starts pulling out of the region undercutting all of our efforts you come to the conclusion that we have to deal with these weak governments these problems are limited legitimacy that they have and the economic and security problems that this is just going to involve more US engagement to supplement the ambassador we feel strongly that we really need to have all of our actors come together in the region from the private sector to the NGO community the IT community obviously host country governments because this has to be a whole of society strategy and the intel community and others in order to address the underlying issues and the drivers whether they are the push factors or the pull factors and we would propose that obviously this not be hosted by the United States and not be in the United States but really be driven by the region let me say a few words now on behalf of the people of the great state of New York and specifically my colleagues on Wall Street because I think that we have reached a really critical moment constructive steps we have a situation right now where large long term asset holders control 40 trillion dollars around the world they are too big to hide from market volatility and what that means is they have a vested interest in addressing the root causes of the challenges that we are speaking about today and we have gamed this out financially with this many large amount of money and all of those money and with this big amount of money and these are just mumbo jumbo and cliches there are hard numbers that go along with this so what we are calling on large asset holders pension funds and downments and the sovereign wealth funds from the countries represented around this table to do is to dedicate 1% of their total holdings to investments in social impact those investments in ways that will incentivize good governance in countries in the region. And if we do that, we'll find that it's not only going to make a much better world, it also is going to be good for business. Senator, if I could have a... Wait, wait. I don't want to go too far down this. I'm listening to you talk. I wonder how much money you leave under your pillow when you lose a tooth. Because there's no way that Wall Street is giving 1% of its money to do that, okay, particularly in a low return environment. And I want to deal with constructive solutions that can lead us towards progress, Manal. As a former general under Havas and Assad, I was really interested, I was really dedicated to following him, but Bashar is no Havas, and after taking great risk to myself and seeing the barrel bombings and what's happening to the people and the international community's response of humanitarian aid, which is like volume and numbing of people, I've decided to defect. I am thankful to the EU for offering me asylum in a place, Saudi Arabia for your packages, and to the US for the intelligence. And since I have now defected, I feel that I must share a very important strategy that we had when I was working under Bashar Assad's regime, that's you. And that is to distract the international community, to make everyone focus on the manifestation of the clash of civilizations. It is a technique, it is a strategy by Assad that everyone continues to fall under and continues to do, and it is something that concerns me as I see my people dying as the strategy continues to work. And so the counter strategy is? And the counter strategy is deal directly with the Assad regime, with the support from the EU and the US and Saudi Arabia that I've had. We the Syrians, you know, high military officials have formed an opposition that's willing to fight directly. It is the injustice, it's the humiliation under these dictatorships that has led people from all over the world to flee and to join the cause. It is nothing to do with the Islamic rhetoric that you guys are discussing. You do not have to send your soldiers in, support us, train and equip us. We will do the primary fighting. We will take care and restore stability to the region. Okay. Good luck. Pardon me, I'm searching for concrete solutions here. And by the way, you know, there is a continuum. We're talking a little bit about a continuum here. You know, the police go and meet with Islamic organizations. They talk about, they identify people who might be persuaded not to go. They do what they can to carve them off. There are others who might go. The intelligence community and the police identify them. They try to keep them from going. They use the IT community to help identify them. You know, these are constructive steps. We need to identify elsewhere along the continuum where constructive steps can be taken. Okay. As a Muslim living in these poor suburbs in different European countries, the first thing, first reaction when an incident of this kind happen is fair. If I am a Muslim and I belong to Islam, it doesn't mean that I wear the hijab. It doesn't mean that I dress like a Salafi. My first reaction will be, oh, I'm going to be in trouble if people see me as a Muslim because the limp will be, you express your Islam then you are a terrorist. What is expected from my point of view as a Muslim citizen is a political discourse and also an implementation of law that can debunk this kind of continuous narrative and it requires courage from the constituency in Europe because the association of Islam and terrorism is not anymore an extreme right discourse. I see it everywhere in all my representative in different national contexts. So how do we do that? This is a clear step in terms of communication and rhetoric. It doesn't cost a lot of money. It requires a lot of political courage. I'm not finished with that. I want to add one more thing. The ideal thing is I was very interested by the law enforcement in Denmark. Locally, we are not the only one on the ground. Why are we turning to Muslims only to deal with issues of security? The security of the local community is a concern of everybody. If we talk about local stability where indeed the question of ISIS can start, we have to encompass many more actors than the Muslim ones. And just one thing, Mr. law enforcement, the mosques and the clerics are really not the place to start. In my family, I have a young cousin, he never goes to mosque. He doesn't even know within his local community, but he knows very much about the strategy of ISIS in Iraq. How do you reach him through the mosque and the Imam of the mosque? And as a millennial, I just want to add, as we think about what's happening in Italy and we look at things that have been happening over the past several years, efforts of people like Imam Pallabaccini or Yalla Italia, organic Italian Muslim organizations that have not been scaled up. I would say that the kind of thing that's happened at this university is just the beginning of the kind of movement that's going to happen with my peers around Europe. So I want to echo what Jocelyn said about going super local and going to what communities of Muslims and non-Muslims have to do on the ground, but talent scouting and finding the local voices and make a difference for my generation. Okay. Yes? That's an extremely articulate millennial, by the way. I think, you know, we're encouraged by, you know, stepping up of security responses and obviously the UAE was ready to cooperate over issues of intelligence, sharing and counter-terrorism, but I think there is a problem when we talk about theology. There is a problem when we talk about the mosque. I know some people here may disagree, but, you know, a lot of the people who are being persuaded by ISIS's message are finding, you know, Islamic voices from the region to be more genuine or more credible. The UAE has plenty of initiatives that work on countering violent extremism, promoting moderate Islam, and we propose to cooperate with European governments, with local communities in Europe, linking up moderate Muslim clerics in Europe with moderate Muslim clerics and institutions in the region to scale up that kind of work, because I think it would go a long way into dissuading people from joining such groups. And you're using modern technologies to do that? I think, you know, he's got his hand up here the whole time, I'm just trying to connect it over. It seems to me, if you're trying to build networks of voices of a certain type and making it easier for moderate theologians to connect to each other, there are tech-powered solutions to help do that. I mean, sure, there are tech-powered solutions, but you need people to engage, I think, you know, personally inside these communities as well. Exactly. But see, I was just setting up a segue here to Sasha, so yeah, go ahead. Sure. So, first of all, let me say it's great to see all of the Google's on twitbooksoft.com users here, and I say that because all of you, every single one of you, is in fact a user of our platform. And to me, that really reminds us of the power of these kinds of open systems for communication and debate. And therefore, we believe it's fundamentally important to keep this conduit of information flow open for our users, to the global media, and for everyone on the planet. And we're going to reiterate the importance of maintaining this open and uncensored series of systems that make up the Google's on twitbooksoft.com platform. Now, the UN is an elitist political antiquated 20th century bureaucracy, but we, and since you've all signed the NDA included in our acceptable use policy, I can share this with you, are creating the UN 2.0 platform, which you all are a part of, as a Google's on twitbooksoft.com user. So we would encourage the use of this new platform for a 21st century debate over these issues. So what you're advocating is the existence of the internet. I think we need to be a little more specific in our constructive suggestions here. Yes? Go back to the example up here and throw this on its head a little bit. What we're looking at here is the violation of the human rights of students to peacefully protest, to assemble, to be free of arbitrary arrest, to be free of excessive force used by the government, by the police against them, specifically because there are Muslim students protesting. That's a real problem. That's a European problem. That's not a problem of the Muslim community. That's a problem of anti-Muslim rhetoric in Europe. So I think we need to all be clear about that. We've seen statistics that 50%, 53% of people in some of these countries are anti-Muslim. That includes the government. So we got to get real about that. Ethnic profiling is not okay. The government needs to say that. The government needs to make sure that's not happening. Arbitrary arrests are not okay. Treating an entire community as suspicious and talking about Muslims in shorthand for extremism is not okay. So as advocacy organizations in Europe, we want to see European leaders, US leaders, but in this case, European leaders, stand up and actually act in ways that are consistent with the human rights of Muslims and other minority communities that are sort of seen as somehow more likely to be extremists in those countries. Also every time European countries turn boats back with refugees in them from Syria and neighboring countries, they are telling people from those countries, they're telling them, we don't care. It's another clear demonstration of indifference to their plight. Okay, very quickly. We've just got a very limited time here. So we're going to go back. We represent the media, and media are nothing if not constructive. We had crowds around us. Which could lead you to conclude the media was nothing. But we'll zero back in on it. I'm just like everybody sort of 30 seconds each, yeah. We had crowds around us of different elements around this table trying to persuade us to project their particular views and their particular solutions and their particular ideas. And we think that one of the services that we can do is first of all explain of what is going on, the politics behind the UN Security Council resolutions and the decisions and the inaction. But then also raise the heat on the policy makers and on people on the ground and those involved in coming up with alternatives, coming up with some kind of solutions and really investigating to see how hard did they really try to reach a solution at the UN Security Council or were they withholding some potential bargaining chips because there were other considerations at play. And at the same time, we are also considering overtures from the UN to write more about the humanitarian actions fine. But what really counts is the origin of the problem at hand and how can we bring that to light and turn up the heat. Very quickly. As enlightened international police advisors, we just like to say how much your comments, human rights activists, how that resonates with us and how we understand that if we don't approach this with the balance of security and rights, we will not be successful. And I think this is what takes us back to the Danish model of a good example of how their outreach to the communities is not just about reaching out to the mosques and the Muslim communities. Okay, next. At the end. Go ahead. The students understand the root cause and origin of this problem is in fact the criminal Assad regime and the criminal elements that support it. We call upon the international community to support us, the revolutionaries from the people who have been with the people since the beginning of this conflict and not making a decision to leave from the regime as a matter of expediency. We have been with the righteous revolution from the beginning. Okay, excellent. And I'm all for the role playing, but we've only got a couple of minutes here. So if you don't have a constructive solution, I don't want to hear from you. Okay. I would just like to, from the Iranian perspective, to introduce what Iran has done in the past when they were engaging with their Western European partners in terms of religious dialogue, not just amongst Muslims, but I think it's important that we expand that as you've mentioned, the European problem with the Islamic identity, it's a major problem. The anti-Islamic sentiments are a major pediment to, you know, collaboration and coexistence. So Iran suggests, like the past, to create a working group that engages with the European partners within the EU, with Iran and other Islamic nations. And I invite the UAE and Saudi Arabia to take part in this and Turkey to bring a more collective and expansive view of Islam to the European continent. Okay. Yeah. So the European Union would like to stress that we are an organization founded on peace, on democracy, on human rights and the rule of law. And we are working, and we would like to work more closely with our national states to reiterate the importance of human rights and the rule of law, especially with the various institutions currently being challenged. We would therefore like to reiterate our invitation to local communities, to work with Lady Aston and others in order to promote dialogue both at a religious and political level, and also to work and share best practices with local law enforcement. Just addressing the business interests from Tunisia, actually, we currently have a public-private partnership draft law in Parliament, and we welcome your feedback on how to improve the provisions. We had an investment and entrepreneurship conference back in March. We welcome your business. And in terms of this scenario here, Tunisia has a very large diasporic community in Europe. We'd like to enhance dialogue with those communities and build social, cultural, and business ties with those communities. And we think this will not only help to harness the potential of the Muslim minority and tackle marginalization in Europe, both perceived and real, but it will also indirectly help to create opportunities in Tunisia for which the EU has expressed support. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much. Now, we've made little baby steps forward here in terms of some small, constructive steps that might be taken in response to this. Police outreach to local Muslim groups, creating dialogue, identifying some bad actors, working with the private sector to identify them, working with the tech community to spread the message, trying to spread a message, a successfully more moderate message, countering negative feelings towards the Muslim community, also trying to take steps to counter negative feelings here. I have to say just as an objective listener to all of this, it sounds a little bit, you'll forgive the expression, social worky to me. It sounds a little bit nice, friendly. Let's do all the stuff that doesn't get dirt underneath our fingernails. All of this stuff is good. I'm not saying it's bad, but I do think there are issues of bad actors trying to cross borders, bad actors trying to do certain things. There are strong negative forces here that have to be addressed at the same time as providing positive forces. As we go through the future stages of this thing, just to ask yourself the question, what are we doing with regard to the really bad actor? What else ought we to be doing? I think some of the US response here in terms of, well, we've got to take stronger action in Syria. We've got to do something, as Nancy referred to at the beginning, to show that we are going to take action and people aren't going to keep dying. This ties to Manal's suggestion of rethinking other kinds of alliances there. We need to think of both the positive steps that can be taken here and the positive cooperation, but also the strong steps to counteract these negative forces. And we will do that in this next round. The next slide is the following that needless to say, as you would do, you look at what happens in Bologna and a big propaganda campaign is launched in response to the Bologna raid and the question here is now, what are the counter strategies to dealing with recruitment? And I deal with that everything. They're doing a propaganda campaign. They're going to try and attract people from these communities, both in the EU and throughout the region. They're going to try to bring them together into Syria and Iraq, into the Daesh community there, but they're going to try to bring them across Turkish borders. So there are issues that have to do with borders there. They're going to try to find funding for them. They're going to try to do other kinds of things that might be interdicted. So think about all of that as you're thinking of this. And the last thing that I would say is, as we're getting into this last round of this first session, we know what your roles are. We know what your politics are. It's fun to play the roles. But if we can, because we have a limited amount of time, try to focus on the concrete solutions without sort of rehashing or resetting exactly who you are. We know who you are. Focus on the solutions. This time, I'd like you to just take five to seven minutes to talk among yourselves, closer to five, and then we're going to reconvene. So five minutes, we'll reconvene. Hey, folks, we're not beginning lunch at this particular moment. That begins after this section. So if you go back to your seats, we'll finish the session, and then we will have lunch after that, OK? So if everybody could return to their seats, can I encourage everybody to do that so that we can start again? But you're not going to go and take 1% of assets and apply them to CSR stuff. OK, well, let's talk about it afterwards. I'd be interested. OK, we're about to begin. If you return to your seats, please. OK. All right, even if not everybody is here, we're going to start again. We're going to... OK, so, ladies and gentlemen, let's resume here for this next, the final portion of this first scenario. Again, focusing in on this issue of how do you deal with these recruitment efforts? And they manifest, you know, there are a lot of choices. And not all of the choices have been talked about here. And so it's useful to get an idea of some of the other choices. And by the way, you know, Western countries, you know, US takes choices in the context of US standards. Other countries take choices in the context of their own standards. We have to realize we're dealing with an international response. And I'd like to get a full sense of what the international options and how different parts of the community will respond. And since Ambassador Alatiba is here, perhaps you can talk a little bit about how the UAE has dealt with some of these things. Yeah, we take a relatively robust approach to prevention. We have, as many of you know, a center for countering violent extremism called the Hedaya Center. And it's been represented here several times in previous peace games. And that is a long-term solution to presenting the alternative narrative to extremism. However, there's also a prevention model. And I was mentioning to David earlier that... And I know this will be judged as harsh and drastic by the West. But we had a case recently where a UAE student studying here in the US started acting different, started following some suspicious Twitter feeds and so on. So one of his colleagues came to us and informed us. He said, hey, this guy looks like he's heading over to Turkey to go through Syria. And I just wanted to bring it to your attention. So we informed our friends in Abu Dhabi. They instructed us to send someone from the embassy to go over there, take his passport away from him, and as soon as he finished with his exams, that we were to put him on a plane to Abu Dhabi directly where he is going to be picked up by the authorities as soon as he lands. Now, yes, is that harsh? Yes. Is it a little overbearing? Yes. But that's one person who's not going to Syria to fight with ISIS. That's one person who's not going to be on the battlefield. And between the government and his family, I think the goal is ultimately to rehabilitate him and make sure that he understands it's not a good idea to go. But that's one form of prevention. And it has to be a part of the package, along with presenting a better narrative for why there are good alternatives to ISIS. Now, I can't speak for other countries, but we take this threat of extremism very seriously. We have since prior to 9-11, and I think that's why the number of Emiratis fighting with ISIS today are somewhere between 40 and 50. So that's how we approach it. Okay, can I turn to you, Georgia, for a second? Because Steve mentioned at the beginning a distinction that you flagged between countering violent extremism, and I think the term was preventing extremist violence. And I was wondering if you could, and I may have that wrong, but I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on the distinction, because they're both components of what we're talking about here. I think that when we talk about prevention in the context of countering violent extremism, we use it differently than was just represented. When we're talking about preventing violent extremism, we're talking about answering the question, why does somebody engage in the first place? It's about addressing the root causes of why they become engaged, whereas the response right there was a tactical response. And for every student who's gonna respond to something on Twitter, there'll be another one. Whereas a preventative response is a more strategic, less tactical response that has to do with understanding the reasons people are going in the first place and addressing those larger structural reasons. So a preventative policing model, for example, would be having the police build strong relationships in a community with parents, with religious leaders, with schools, with teachers, so that they're on the forefront ahead of the curve, not just responding to people who've already passed some sort of criminal threshold who already present a threat of radicalization. Okay, no, it's very helpful. And one of the reasons I bring up both is there's a spectrum of actions to take. And I think part of our goal here is to identify the things that are along the spectrum and then to say every decision that every government and every company makes is an asset allocation decision. And essentially, where do you apply the assets to get the most likely positive return? So I'm gonna turn to Tom and then I'm gonna turn to the rest of you for your constructive responses to what we have here. Thank you. We may be an antiquated 20th century organization, but we do have a very good global counter-terrorism strategy that is organized around four pillars and is designed to take a multi-sectoral approach to addressing not just terrorism, but also extremism. And it's organized around four things that we've talked about. We've talked about conditions conducive or root causes, phrase we don't use in the UN for reasons that I'm never entirely clear on, but it's the same thing. We talk about enforcement, hard-shedged enforcement, whether that is financial trafficking type stuff, whether that is border security, whether that is training effective interviewers, all of these different things. We do capacity building. Part of the big problem that we face is in the areas of the world we're talking about, capacity is lacking. That may not be true of Turkey, but it's certainly true of Central Africa, it's certainly true of Western Africa, and it's certainly true of parts of the Middle East. So building capacity, finding funding to go out and train effective law enforcement and effective military is a very important part of the program as well. And then finally for us, a very huge part is the resilience of rights and the rule of law. When one looks at these narratives again and again and again, it is a narrative about abuse of rights, it is a narrative about corruption, it is a narrative about state failure. So building and reinforcing these values is a very important part of the response. So I as the UN would encourage member states to look at that strategy, implement that strategy. It was passed as a unanimous resolution of the General Assembly. I mean, that's pretty powerful when you stop to think about it. It gives you a fantastic roadmap to a comprehensive response. And if you can look up from Twitter on all these fantastic 21st century devices for a moment, you'll see that there's actually quite a lot to be said for this somewhat staid old fashioned approach. Would you say that the greatest inadequacy of the response therefore is its adoption? Or is there more than we, because clearly extremism is spreading, right? So what we've done thus far is actually not stopping its spread because we've done it and it's not stopping it. So the question is, what do we need to do? And that's, you know, as a... It's very overwhelming for people, right? I mean, we're talking about four different pillars, lots of different types of actions. One of the things we started doing at the UN is taking it down a notch and moving away from a comprehensive international response, which we obviously support and promote, to look at regional responses. So actually my job within the UN is developing regional counterterrorism strategies within existing organs, organs like, say, SADIC in Southern Africa or UNOCO in Central Africa. We've already got a regional counterterrorism strategy in Central Asia. It's the same strategy, but it's working with local governments so they can adopt it locally. Okay. So we're gonna kind of get into the lightning round of constructive responses here that we haven't touched upon yet. Dan, you've been very patient. Hit the microphone so we can hear. In the spirit of getting beyond social work solutions, from Turkey's perspective, we've been talking about the symptom and not the cause. And the cause, or one of the central causes, is the government in Damascus. And it's continued, the government in Damascus, in fact, promoted Daesh as an organization to justify its attack on the opposition. It's unlawful and inhumane attack. The humanitarian solution with an inhuman government will not work. Therefore, if the international community expects Turkey to do what it needs ultimately to do, and that is shut down the border, so there is no flow of international recruits into Syria, we're gonna need a much more robust American policy. And we've been conferring about just such a policy, a new form of cooperation and a new deal, as it were, between the United States and Turkey, that would do just that, would shut down the capacity of these recruits to go into Syria and fight this war, which, of course, Assad has promoted. So I'll hand it over to my colleague, Ambassador Jeffrey, to outline the elements of this policy. If possible, under NATO, but otherwise, bilaterally, after the, this is important, after the Turkish elections on Saturday, we'll announce a joint operation to seal the border with a very large deployment of Turkish troops, again with American and possibly NATO support, in return for which, or as that begins to stand up, U.S. support for the Turkish no-fly zone, safe zone in a range of cities and towns stretching from the Turkish border to areas just short of Aleppo over a two-month period. And we are convinced that this will do two things. One, it will more effectively than almost anything else limit the ability of people to get, whether they want it or not, to get to Syria to fight with ISIS. Secondly, it will begin to the long road towards finding a solution to the Assad regime. You know, in some respects, as you listen, whether you think that's practical, it's going to happen in the near term or not. Shutting down that border is clearly one of the most important steps you can take. In some respects, it's useful to think of all of this as a supply chain problem, you know, and that there is, you know, there are origins, and then there's a supply chain, and you want to get it at the point of origin. If you can't, then you want to get it at the pressure points within the supply chain. And that's one of them. And so that, you know, I mean, whether that one can happen or not, clearly if one could take steps to close that border, that would be a gigantic step forward in dealing at least with the problems of Daesh. Yes. You know, we've had this whole discussion and we haven't talked about the root of the ideology of ISIS, and we're talking about countering narrative. We haven't talked about Wahhabism. We haven't talked about the delegitimization and dehumanization of people. We just had ISIS-Daesh attacks talking about Syria and our country, we're facing it, but so Saudi Arabia, they're not concerned. They had attacks on their Shia community, and the same clerics inside Saudi Arabia have been calling the Shia Rawafid, Mahjus, fire worshipers, Safawien, and they're not saying anything about this. So we're talking about countering a narrative and from our perspective in Syria, and yet we're enabling, supporting, and not talking about the other groups or wider society saying that these people do not have worth as human beings. So how are we countering the narrative? I would ask everybody around this table who's speaking about that from their respective countries, and we can crack down on those other accounts and clerics as well. Rami. Great. First of all, to the US and Turkey, I hope if they close the borders, they don't close the borders for humanitarian assistance as well as refugees crossing into Turkey because that will create more enemies than necessary. Second, we need to focus on reducing conditions conducive to recruitment, and that includes increasing activities in recruitment countries, and that's essential services, be it medical or food or humanitarian assistance in Libya and Tunisia and some of those communities, focusing on education, as well as focusing on creating economic opportunities in order for people not to be easily recruited, and obviously we'll need the support of our donors working with the UN and the business community as well. By the way, in that, there's another implicit point, which is this is a global problem, but you can't actually think globally. You have to act locally. You've got to pick places, and we have a list of places that supply a lot more foreign fighters than others, and so you have to focus on those places, those conditions, those supply chains, how they get from there to the battlefield as well as focusing on the conditions in the battlefield, and so I think prioritizing in that regard is a constructive suggestion, yes. Well, as media, we don't do counter strategies. We don't do propaganda or counter propaganda. Some people think we do propaganda or should be doing counter propaganda. But what do you recommend? But our job is to report on the strategies that have worked and what have not. I think what the media can also do is to really push this issue to the center of public discourse without taking on the role of, without doing advocacy, you know? Try to strike the right balance between reporting what's happening and promoting ISIS propaganda, becoming a propaganda tool for ISIS. That's the tricky thing, and trying to put more resources into reporting and pushing this to the forefront of public discourse. Okay, can we start? And we would do that by forming a consortium of 10 news organizations with a particular dedication to reporting about this issue specifically in a comprehensive way and looking globally, including news organizations on the ground in the affected zones. Construct, just, we've got five minutes. So if you don't have a constructive specific idea, then save the comment for later, yes. Some of my friends find the videos really appealing. I do too. This is millennial youth, this is millennial youth? Yes, I'm playing my role. Oh, I see, yeah. I hope. But what I would find really appealing is to hear the stories of former people that went and came back and that tell me what really is going on. So what I'd really like the communities to do is to help fund films online and also opportunities offline and on the radio that can tell me the stories of the real people that have gone that will help me understand what the journey to ISIS would be. By the way, very powerful idea in the context. We talk about foreign fighters and we talk about the return and the threat, but a lot of them are returning extremely disaffected and having seen the horrible stuff. And so you can harness that into an alternative narrative. Very briefly. Briefly, internationally, and I would like to pick up on the previous comment on political Islam is not the monopoly of group like ISIS and Al-Qaeda. It has been diffused by some friends of the West. We mentioned Saudi Arabia. We can mention lots of other even secular state that are not up to protecting religious freedom. So what do we do with that? Is the West equipped to work with that? The ideology of intolerance start a lot in national context. If we look at how kids are taught about their religion in all the even so-called friend of the West, what do we find? So is there any way that this can be done? One way, in my opinion, is to work with clerics and religious actors that are not paid by the state. They exist and they are networked for that and they have to find a voice internationally that can counter the neo-Salafi voice. Okay, specific concrete suggestions. Simon. Saudi Arabia hasn't been saying a lot. Our big voice, we are the leader of Islam and we've got the money to back it with. Some of that money is we will now be investing in Europe in order to set up cultural centers so that Muslims in Europe, true Islam, be distracted by the callings of Daesh, et cetera. Why the existing? This is not new. Okay, well, let's just keep moving around the table. Quickly and constructive, please. Yeah, it's a joint statement from the local Sunni and local insurgent groups. Two points, rapidly. One is, I mean, there was a mention of the Turks and Americans sitting the border. Of course, we are best placed to do this on the other side of the border and also we can make the experience as, I mean, this is off the record, but quite unpleasant for foreign fighters in order to deter the most risk-averse people in the future. And also we're happy to contribute to a media campaign to encourage people who sympathize with our struggle to stay home. Just a reaction to something that was said by law enforcement people. I don't think it's productive to tell people who are in sense about what's happening is that they should do necessarily humanitarian work. I mean, they should also be free to do advocacy. I mean, that's what happened in Italy, protesting against Western policies. It's not, I mean, because humanitarian is a bit like, you're asking them to sit idly by and just help the people who suffer, but they should be able to act as well politically in Western societies in our interest. Okay, briefly. Yes, Iran believes that Saudi Arabia can do a great deal more to foster tolerance and to end the sectarian conflict. We don't think opening cultural centers in Europe is an answer to the problem. It'll probably just make things worse. We believe that the Saudi government should show more tolerance to the Shia within its own country, stop bombing Yemen in a useless civil war. Oh, okay, okay, okay. And agree to a summit meeting with the leaders of Iran to discuss practical solutions to the problems that are at the root cause of this radicalization. Okay, strongly encourage people not to speak in press releases we've already read. Catherine. I'm trying to avoid press releases. We think one of the great things about the European Union and Europe, and this is not a press release, is actually its diversity of Muslim voices and actually the ways in which we can foster non-sectarian violence within Europe is really, really important and getting the diverse Muslim communities together is something the European Union can do and can fund. And I think that's a really practical way forward to help build across Muslim communities so that that then can reach across our borders as well. Salam. We think that focusing on the last stage of the movement of recruits to Syria, the border between Turkey and Syria is a mistake. To close a long border in an unfavorable terrain is mission impossible. One have to look at the route of the recruits and look for chalk points, like the airports in the entry to Turkey which are few and controllable. So you need better border control there and not in the border with Syria. Okay, very constructive, very quickly. Yep, two quick things, one immediate, which is major international investments in helping us, since this is all done on the Google's on twitbooksoft.com platform, helping us curate, identify, and create alternative communities for this kind of content. Number one, so funding for us. Number two, international norms so that we are not in the position of being pulled in a thousand different directions by this hodgepodge of different rules and regulations about acceptable content on a case by case basis and a state by state basis that all of you who are states need to get together and come up with what are the rules of the road for our platform. Okay, last comment. Just a point on the propaganda. A little bit closer to the mic. Sorry, just a point on the propaganda. On this table is represented between 70% of the producers or consumers of media in the region, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. And I think that there is a role for these countries to play in the media organizations they own and control in creating a counter propaganda campaign, explicitly countering the propaganda, not narrative, not social narratability, just the propaganda on joining the fight in Syria, on joining ISIS, you know. And I think there is a role to be played and I think it's underexploited. Very, very interesting. Very constructive. Have we solved all the problems that are addressed with recruitment here? No. Have we identified some pathways and some priorities? Yes. Has it been constructive? Have we shown some progress? Yes. Before we wrap it up, I'd like to turn to you, either of you, and ask if you have any last comments on this opening session. Pick it up later, pick it up later. So this is what's gonna happen. We are going to go. We have, in the way the schedule works now, is 12.15 to 1.00 p.m. And by that I mean now to 1.00 p.m. We're gonna, you have a buffet lunch break in there. There's an opportunity to sit down, relax, have a sandwich, and then at 1.00 p.m. please, because we will end precisely at 5.15, one way or another, if not before. 1.00 p.m. come back here. We have a framing session, which is a chance to just get out other ideas that you may have that you've hit upon over lunch and so forth, in which we're gonna talk about offering alternatives to today's insurgent myths and realities about what works. I wanna really break down some of what's been discussed here and then tee up the afternoon session, which is gonna be combating contagion, which is the other side, which is what happens when foreign fighters either go to other conflicts or go back home and what can be done along the way. And then we've got a concluding session in which we're gonna talk about shaping strategies and we're lucky to have joining us for that concluding session, by the way, Greg Treverton, who is the Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which is the forward-looking part of the Directorate of National Intelligence here, and Graham Allison of Harvard University, who is a well-known strategist who thinks about these things and has got a lot to contribute and is beginning to work with us in some aspects of peace game. And so we'll come to some good conclusions, we'll draw the themes together in that session. But we clearly won't get there if we don't get to lunch now. So have a good lunch, thank you for a great morning, and we'll see you at one o'clock.