U.K. Muslim communitiesBritain searches for ways to fight radicalization among Muslim youths

More than 500 Britons have traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight for extremist groups, including the Islamic State (ISIS), and roughly half of them have returned home, according to British intelligence officials. Law enforcement authorities are now concerned that those individuals may carry out attacks on British soil. This year alone, London police have disrupted as many as five plots to carry out attacks in Britain, up from just one plot a year, according to London’s Metropolitan Police commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe. Prime Minister David Cameron has proposed legislation which would bar British citizens suspected of fighting alongside extremist groups in the Middle East from returning to Britain. Their names would be added to a no-fly list and their British passports revoked. Fighters who decide to return home despite the ban, would be arrested at the border and could face imprisonment or severe restrictions on their movement for up to two years.

TheLos Angeles Times reports that some British civil rights groups oppose Cameron’s proposal, claiming it would leave suspects stateless. Instead, they urge British officials to look for long term solutions like economic development and continued investment in vulnerable populations through community support groups such as the youth league of the Bangladesh Football Association, a British organization which works within the Bangladeshi community in London’s East End. Tarik Khan, head of the youth league, meets weekly with members in their early twenties. Over the years, Britain has spent millions of dollars on community outreach programs intended to curb radicalization among at-risk youths, but those programs seem to be ineffective as ISIS continues to boast a growing number of British fighters within its ranks.

“Obviously it hasn’t done anything, because the problem is still here, and it’s actually got worse, hasn’t it?” Khan said. “It’s increasingly getting bad by the day.” Khan’s youth football league was once involved in a project that received public funding to curb radicalization- funding for his program was cut. “It’s tough growing up here,” said Khan. “There’s a lot of unemployment.”

Cameron’s move to revoke the passports of suspected terrorists will do little to curb the recruitment of young Muslim men into Islamic militant groups. “A lot of these kids, they don’t care if they get killed or not,” said Khan, questioning the policy proposal. “So making them stateless isn’t really going to mean much.” “I sympathize with people who do go into this,” he added. “There’s something that’s triggered it. We need to work with them.”

From 2008 to 2009, the British government spent more than $200 million as part of its Prevent program to influence Muslim youths. It did not work, said Fiyaz Mughal, the founder and director of Faith Matters, an interfaith and anti-extremist London-based outreach organization. “The strategy was to blanket whole communities to see what would come in, to see who would engage.” The program’s connection to British police led many Muslims to think it was a ploy to spy on their communities. Mughal urges British officials to connect with Muslim organizations with transparency in mind, and put aside popular beliefs that some Muslim organizations may be too radical and hold views contradictory to British values such as democracy, freedom of speech, and equal rights between men and women.

The East London Mosque boasts a congregation of 7,000 for Friday prayers, but it has hosted several controversial speakers in the past, including Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric who was killed in September 2011 by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen. Such organizations may be among the few to have any influence on Britain’s vulnerable Muslim youth population, Mughal said. “We need to reconnect with some of those networks, which actually are picking up people who have very, very extreme views,” Mughal said. “The government’s very risk-averse, and the reality is this work involves some element of risk.”