Since April, almost every article about Australian involvement in the Syrian civil war, repeats the claim that 200 Australians are fighting in the insurgency.

This number is being treated as the one and only official estimate, and two days ago an article in TIME incorrectly attributed the number directly to “a public statement made by David Irvine, director general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO)”.

In this post I argue that the 200 figure should not be treated as authoritative, and present several reasons why it’s likely to be an over-estimate. I’ve made several of these arguments before, but as the TIME article irked me I’ve decided to put them all together to make a clear case for scepticism.

There is no one official, public, estimate of the number of Australian fighters in Syria. Instead there have been several conflicting reports of statements by government officials.

200 figure originated from an article in The Australian on Saturday 13 April, where Cameron Stewart and Paul Maley reported that “the number of Australians believed to be fighting in Syria has doubled in less than six months to about 200, and ASIO is concerned that at least 100 are fighting for radical al-Qa’ida offshoot, the al-Nusra Front.”

In an article published on Monday 16 April, a journalist had asked ASIO Director-General David Irvine about Australians fighting in Syria. He stated that “we are talking in the hundreds and not the tens”. This suggested that ASIO officially endorsed the estimate of 200 or more fighters (which was how I interpreted it in this article I wrote on the day).

However, Irvine’s words may have been a bit more ambiguous. While the journalist, Brendan Nicholson, stated that Irvine was referring specifically to fighters, it is not clear from the actual quote whether Irvine was referring only to fighters or to all Australians involved in the conflict in some capacity.

Later that evening, Foreign Minister Bob Carr was interviewed on 7:30 and explicitly downplayed the 200 fighters claim by saying:

“There was a global figure quoted on the weekend in an interview I did that I can’t confirm or deny. The number of Australians who actually had been participating in the fighting would be a good deal lower than that 200 figure that was quoted. That 200 figure, if it is right, would include people who are raising money, expressing sympathy, people who have been described to me as Jihadist tourists turning up in a trouble spot.” [emphasis added]

Recent reporting casts further doubt on the ‘200 fighters, 100 with Jabhat al-Nusra’ claim. On 22 June Federal Police Commissioner Peter Drennan, while cautioning that the numbers were unclear, said that only “a handful” of Australians were believed to be fighting with Jabhat al-Nusra. It’s not clear how many “a handful” is, but it certainly sounds like less than 100.

Then on 1 July the Sydney Morning Herald reported that “the Australian Federal Police believe 150 to 200 Australians have travelled to Syria, with a significant proportion fighting with the resistance, about half of whom are with al-Qaeda aligned group Jabhat al-Nusra”. [emphasis added]

So there are no solid numbers available, but the ‘200 fighters, 100 with Jabhat al-Nusra’ claim should just be considered as one estimate among several, and all other government statements (with the possible exception of David Irvine’s) suggest the number is lower.

My own view is that 200 figure is extremely high compared to past trends in Australian jihadism, and therefore is probably an over-estimate. I went into that in the article from April:

“A recent study by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR), based on 450 sources including Western and Arabic media and online jihadist forums, estimates that 135-590 Europeans have joined the insurgency.

…

At the time the ICSR’s European estimates were published, April 2, the study’s author Aaron Zelin provided the following estimate for Australia: 18-123 fighters.

…..

The ICSR’s estimate has been superseded by the more recent figure of 200 Australians involved. This new figure cannot currently be verified, and should be treated cautiously until more information comes out. The estimate is higher than the ICSR’s maximum estimates for any European country, and one third of their maximum estimate for Europe as a whole. This seems doubtful, particularly as Australia usually has far lower rates of jihadist activity than many European countries.

Open-source research by myself and my colleague Shandon Harris-Hogan has found 17 cases of Australians allegedly involved in jihadist activity in Lebanon between 2000 and 2012. If the estimate of 200 Australians involved in jihadism in the Syria-Lebanon region since the outbreak of the Syria conflict is accurate, it represents an unprecedented escalation.”

None of this changes the fact that there has been substantial Australian involvement in the insurgency, and that the Syria conflict raises extremely serious security concerns for Australia, both because of current local violence and the potential threat from returning fighters.

But that only makes it more important for anyone writing on the issue to be careful with the facts. Personally, I can’t make any claim to know what the actual number of Australians fighting in Syria would be, and will reconsider my arguments if more solid information becomes available. However,  for now I recommend scepticism towards this widely-reported 200 figure.

This large estimate is worrying but fortunately not authoritative, as it is in serious tension with several government statements, the currently available empirical information, and past trends.

The Syrian civil war raises national security concerns for Australia, not only because a number of citizens have joined the insurgency (leading to the recent proscription of Jabhat al-Nusra) but because of local violence by supporters of both sides.

To help gauge the extent of this local violence, here is a list of the incidents reported in the media so far. These are the 17 reported incidents referred to in the Sydney Morning Herald today.

I’ve intentionally included as many incidents as possible to be as comprehensive as open sources allow. Most of the events involve serious violence (arson, assaults and shootings), but not all. Also, as this list is of events reported in the media, not proven events, it may turn out in a couple of cases that the reported incident did not occur. Some of the events may turn out to be regular criminal violence that was wrongly attributed to Syria-related sectarian tensions.

However, list also likely misses several incidents. Many crimes in general are not reported to police, many crimes reported to police do not get covered in the media, and many journalists have found that victims of this Syria-related violence have been afraid to talk. For these reasons I suspect the true extent of Syria-related violence in Australia is somewhat greater than this list suggests, particularly in Sydney.

The incidents are divided by the city they occurred in, then by the side of the conflict the perpetrator was likely on, and within those categories they are listed in chronological order.

Canberra. Pro-rebellion, February 2012: Up to forty men forcibly entered the Syrian Embassy and damaged property. [ABC]

Sydney. Pro-rebellion, February 2012: A Sydney man was shot immediately after a Facebook debate over the Syria conflict. [Global Mail; The Age; SBS; Sydney Morning Herald]

Sydney. Pro-rebellion, July 2012: Suspicious fire destroyed a Bankstown chicken shop, with the owner believing he was targeted because he was a Shia Muslim. [Global Mail; The Leader; Sydney Morning Herald]

Sydney. Pro-rebellion, August 2012: A fight outside a Sydney train station hospitalised an elderly supporter of the Syrian government. [ABC]

Sydney. Pro-rebellion, November 2012: Two men were arrested after alleged threats to a Shia mosque during Ashura. [Daily Telegraph; Adelaide Now]

Sydney. Pro-rebellion, throughout 2012: A Shia man who owned a juice shop, that was targeted in the Facebook page “Boycott Tyranny”, was assaulted and extorted. [Global Mail; Sydney Morning Herald]

Sydney. Pro-rebellion, April 2013: A Sydney man was assaulted on ANZAC Day by men he believed to be followers of convicted terrorist Belal Khazaal, who had been his neighbour. [Today Tonight]

Sydney. Pro-rebellion, May 2013: Jamal Daoud, an opponent of the Syrian insurgency, was punched in front of Today Tonight cameras. [Today Tonight]

Sydney. Side unclear, August 2012: Four shootings in quick succession were reported as having possible links to the Syria conflict. [ABC]

Melbourne. Pro-rebellion, March 2012: A petrol bomb attack was carried out against a Turkish Alawite centre in North Coburg. [Global Mail; The Age]

Melbourne. Pro-rebellion, date unclear but early to mid 2012.: An Alawite man was attacked in the street by six men. [The Australian]

Melbourne. Pro-rebellion, date unclear but early to mid 2012: Suspicious fire destroyed an Alawite prayer room in Greenvale. [The Australian; The Australian]

Melbourne. Pro-rebellion, November 2012: Armed men confronted and chased the Alawite owner of shop in Thomastown, telling him “we’re going to shut you down, you Alawite dog.” [The Australian; Today Tonight]

Melbourne. Pro-rebellion, date unclear: An Alawite Muslim’s house was firebombed. [Today Tonight]

Melbourne. Anti-rebellion, date unclear: Arson attack occurred against the car yard owned by the husband of Sonya el-Abbas, whose brother had died in Syria. [The Australian]

Melbourne. Anti-rebellion, date unclear: Another arson attack occurred against the car yard owned by the husband of Sonya el-Abbas, this time caught on tape. [The Australian; Today Tonight]

Melbourne. Anti-rebellion, date unclear: Drive by shooting attempt against the house of Sonya el-Abbas. [The Australian]

Feel free to send any incidents I may have missed, with sources.

This is another short post to announce a new publication. Yesterday The Strategist (the blog of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute) published a post of mine on the oversight of Australian intelligence agencies.

The post argues that Australian intelligence agencies are excessively secret, and that their accountability mechanisms fall short, when compared to several other liberal democracies.

It was part of a conversation The Strategist was having on intelligence oversight. I’ve pasted the relevant posts below.

Tobias Feakin, Looking through the Prism, 17 June 2013

Andrew Davies, Government surveillance and Australia’s multiple watchdogs, 19 June 2013

Andrew Zammit, Australian intelligence organisations: the limits of oversight, 24 June 2013

Nic Stuart, Orwell’s dilemma: more reflections on intelligence oversight, 25 June 2013

Andrew Davies, Even more reflections on intelligence, 4 July 2013

Kristy Bryden, A little transparency, please, 7 August 2013

Update 1: Added Andrew Davies’ latest post on 4 July.

Update 2: Added Kristy Bryden’s on 25 August.

Blogging has been light this month, but I’ve had two recent publications you may like to see.

The first is this post on the ideological diversity of terrorism, published on Fatima Measham’s blog This is Complicated.

The post was prompted by the apparent return of the idea that ‘not all Muslims are terrorists, but nearly all terrorists are Muslims’. This idea seemed to have faded away a bit after the attacks by Anders Breivik and Wade Michael Page, but has returned in some circles following the attacks in Boston and Woolwich. After Andrew Bolt stated that “[w]e have the right to worry, and even the right to suspect every time a bomb goes off that Muslim hands set the detonator”, I felt the need to present the available terrorism statistics and show that jihadism is far from the only threat.

That said, the post does show that jihadism indeed poses the greatest current terror threat to Australia. For more detail on that threat, have a look at my upcoming article (paywalled) in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism.

Abstract

After 2003, Australia’s domestic jihadist plots shifted from being externally-guided to being entirely self-starting, which was out of sync with international trends. To identify the causes behind this turning point, this paper first provides a brief overview of jihadist activity in Australia, showing how the post-2003 shift differentiates it from comparable countries. The paper then examines several potential explanations for the shift that prove insufficient. Following that, the paper demonstrates that the shift occurred because key facilitators between Australia and South Asia were removed or deterred. This factor, combined with the limited strategic importance of Australia, low levels of jihadist radicalisation, and limited diaspora involvement from the countries most central to al-Qaeda operations, explains Australia’s specific pattern of jihadist activity.

Note that this is not the final version of the article. Rather, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism is providing a new service of allowing the articles to go online before final publication, so that authors’ research findings can reach the public as early as possible, as explained here:

For selected journals, Taylor & Francis offers the Accepted Manuscript (AM) Online feature, whereby the accepted (but unedited and uncorrected) manuscript is posted online, normally five working days after receipt at Taylor & Francis, and appear in a “Latest articles” list on the journal’s webpage. The posted file is clearly identified as an unedited author’s accepted manuscript that has been scheduled for publication. Copy-editing, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof are then undertaken on this manuscript before formal publication of the Version of Record (VoR). During production and pre-press, errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal relate to the AM Online version.

The final version will be out in September this year.

My colleague Muhammad Iqbal shows how the EDL’s actions following the Woolwich attack follow its traditional method of mobilising support.

The brutal murder of a British soldier in Woolwich on Thursday sparked immediate reaction by the far-right English Defence League (EDL), with 250 members of the group taking to the streets in protest.

This development should not be surprising, as from its beginnings the EDL mobilised support by preying on citizens’ fears of Muslim extremists.

EDL’s origins

The EDL can trace its roots to the an incident on March, 2009, where a group of Muslim radicals, collectively known at the time as Ahle Sunnah al Jamah, staged a protest and shouted abusive phrases at soldiers returning from active duty in Afghanistan.

Also at the incident was anti-Muslim activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who is now more commonly known as Tommy Robinson. Prior to this incident, Robinson claims to have been active in protesting what he describes as the Islamisation of Luton, going back all the way to 2004 when he and other individuals held up banners saying “Ban the Luton Taliban”.

However, after the incident with the returning troops, and similar protests in other parts of the country, Robinson felt that his struggle should be taken to the national level. He did this through establishing the English Defence League.

From its formation, the EDL gained strength from the activities of Muslim extremists. This is exemplified through both the EDL’s real-world and online activities.

EDL’s online presence

While the EDL does not have an official YouTube account, many of its followers have uploaded videos of EDL related activities or created whole channels dedicated to the group.

This was examined in research I presented at last year’s GTReC conference. As one example, I found that out of 155 videos on one unofficial EDL account, 23% specifically mentioned the Ahle Sunnah al Jamah, one of its successors, or members of these groups. A further 45% of the videos have as its main focus, the supposed dangers of Islam, Muslims and/or Shariah law. Only 32% of these videos did not mention a perceived Muslim threat.

Further analysis of the contents of these videos show that they can also encourage its viewers to demonstrate or rally against the actions of Muslims that were perceived to be “Islamising” Britain.

One such example of this was a string of videos that was in direct response to the launch of a “Shariah Controlled Zone” campaign that was initiated by a group called al-Muhajiroun, the successors of Ahle Sunnah al Jamah. The YouTube videos urged its viewers to attend demonstrations protesting the establishment of such zones, which sometimes drew large numbers.

Such demonstrations have in the past degenerated into violent skirmishes with the police or counter-protest rallies.

The EDL today

In recent years, the EDL have seen a decline in popularity. Whereas its rallies used to attract people in the thousands, the past year or so have seen events attended by only hundreds of people.

However, terror attacks such as the brutal slaying of Lee Rigby can provide the far-right group with a platform through which they can revive their divisive and destructive activities. The surge of new followers on their twitter account, and the fact that their Facebook account boasts more than 100,000 “likes” since the attack, shows that they are well poised to exploit such tragedies. So far, this has also translated to a spike in attendance of EDL rallies, with a rally in Newcastle attracting between 1500 to 2000 supporters. This was then followed by a march through London, which attracted around 1000 people.

The actions of the EDL will do nothing but further fuel this cycle of hatred, and in the face of such tragedy, cooler heads need to prevail.

Muhammad Iqbal is a researcher at the Global Terrorism Research Centre (GTReC). He is a graduate of Monash University’s Master of International Relations, completing a dissertation on the historical development of Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia. His interests include radical movements in Indonesia and Australia, as well as progressive Islamic thought and movements in Indonesia.

The recent terror attacks in Boston and London have re-ignited a lot of discussion over “self-radicalisation” and “lone wolves”. Unfortunately, these terms are used in lots of different ways, just as “terrorism”, “radicalisation”, “jihadism” and “homegrown terrorism” are, leading to lots of confused discussion.

This is not just in the media. Among scholars there are loads of different terms used to describe the size and structure of terrorist cells and their relationships with wider extremist movements.

To help make sense of this, I’ve made this table that breaks down the defining characteristics of the terms used by scholars in this field.

The left hand column describes five different variations that terror plots may have in their relationship with other extremist organisations or individuals.  The middle column presents the terms used to describe these variations in attacks carried out by two or more people (a cell). The right hand column presents the terms used to describe these variations in attacks that are carried out by a single person.

Note that the terms used by Sageman, Silber and Neumann and Rogers can apply to both cells and individuals, but I’ve chosen not to put them in the “individual” column to avoid clutter.

Feel free to make suggestions. Also let me know if you have any idea why WordPress is not displaying the vertical lines.

I recently watched Romper Stomper for the first time in years. Romper Stomper is a 20 year old movie about a fictional neo-Nazi skinhead* gang in Melbourne (see the trailer here).

As I’ve become very interested in far-right extremism over the past six months or so, I decided to write a post on how this movie relates to the reality of extreme right activities in Australia at the time.

Romper Stomper is about the exploits and collapse of a skinhead gang in Melbourne. The story (which I won’t go into) centres on the gang’s leader Hando (Russell Crowe), his best mate Davey (the late Daniel Pollock), and Gabrielle (Jacqueline McKenzie) who is initially a love interest for Hando.

The gang prowl the streets of Footscray assaulting Vietnamese-Australians, perceiving them as invaders. They squat in disused factories and warehouses (it was set during the recession), venturing out to engage in violence against “gooks” in what Hando views as valiant struggle to defend what’s rightfully theirs.

The movie is fictional, but is drawn from some real incidents. The most well-known example is neo-Nazi Dane Sweetman, who was tried and convicted for murder shortly before Romper Stomper was made.  Sweetman and his gang had carried out violence against Jews, Asians and homosexuals in Melbourne during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

While on bail for a pre-meditated bashing of someone he suspected was gay, Sweetman got into an argument with a fellow skinhead named David Noble during a party held on Hitler’s birthday. So he murdered Noble, before cutting his legs off with an axe to fit the body into a car boot. Sweetman’s inspiration is openly acknowledged through a scene where Hando holds an axe to two hippies and threatens them by saying “I’ll chop your legs off.”

Director Geoffrey Wright has pointed to some other inspirations for the movie:

Well, Dane Sweetman was something that we looked at, but it probably didn’t begin with him. It began earlier, we just noticed a shift in some of the street gangs. Some of the street thugs had taken on certain political ideas and drew inspiration from their counterparts in Europe, and we saw it happening here in Melbourne. We thought this was interesting. We started doing a lot of interviews. I’ve still to this day got a box full of 1/4″ tape, of dozens and dozens and dozens of these characters that we spoke to, who were either on their way into it or on their way out. We were very rarely able to speak to people who were in the cutting edge of it in that moment. Of course, the ones who were into it, were either on the run, or didn’t want to talk to us or were suspicious of us, or what have you. But Dane Sweetman’s story became known to us, and we met people who knew him. So that got rolled up into the general research of the thing, but I wouldn’t say that the Dane Sweetman story was the sole inspired to make the film, it was a number of things.

In his commentary on the 20th anniversary DVD release, Wright states that Romper Stomper was loosely based on ten or so real incidents that involved several different gangs, over the space of a few years, across multiple Australian states. For the sake of an engaging movie, these incidents are all compacted and are carried out by a single gang, over the space of a week, all in Footscray.

This created the impression of a bigger neo-Nazi problem than actually existed, which was unfortunate for Footscray’s inhabitants. The Age reported on the local reaction at the time:

In the film, the area is turned into a battleground for rival gangs of skinheads and Vietnamese-Australians, prompting one councillor to threaten legal action against its makers.

The rest of the council take a different line. The Mayor, Councillor Bert Jessup, said his only regret was to have to give further publicity to a film he described as “almost puerile”.

Footscray police agree. They said yesterday that they were tired of answering calls from concerned citizens seeking advice on how to deal with skinhead gangs that do not exist.

“We would be wrong to say that some of the violent behavior didn’t occur, but it is not common to Footscray. It’s all over Australia,” said Councillor Jessup.

He said a woman reported seeing a skinhead in a shopping centre, but no one had to dodge gangs of skinheads in supermarkets. “Racism is not prevalent. We are one of the most multicultural cities in the world.” A local youth worker, Mr Les Twentyman, said two skinheads once lived in Footscray, but they had moved on several months ago. “The movie was a whole lot of crap. It’s all right for arty-farty film-makers to come out here, but they have no regard for the consequences,” he said.

The movie gave the impression that neo-Nazism was far more prevalent in Australia than it was, but by being loosely based on real incidents, it still portrayed a problem that genuinely existed.

Romper Stomper’s portrayal of the neo-Nazi skinheads’ lifestyle was also partially accurate. The skinhead gang is portrayed as bunch of jobless, homeless, directionless, alcohol-driven hooligans, driven more by adrenaline, adventure and camaraderie than by ideological commitment.

Their leader, Hando, is the only one who actually reads Nazi literature and discusses the ideas involved. Other members wear Nazi symbols, purchase memorabilia and are of course overtly racist, but are committed to neo-Nazism more as an attitude than an ideology. The characters are not methodical in their violence, nor do they carry out actual political activism.

This misses out part of what was actually occurring at the time. Some neo-Nazi skinheads throughout Australia attended demonstrations, distributed leaflets, posted stickers, formed bands, organised concerts or were affiliated with formal organisations, sometimes acting as enforcers. This sort of activity does not feature in Romper Stomper.

Yet the movie’s portrayal of them as primarily disorganised thugs still has a lot of truth to it. Members of formal organisations have spoken of facing difficulty when trying to organise skinheads into any kind of coherent force. For example, Jim Saleam, who led the far-right extremist organisation National Action (NA), has written that:

Simon Dinsbergs, WAR[White Aryan Resistance]’s director, said that the film Romper Stomper “reasonably accurately” portrayed Skinhead life and its alcohol and racial-violence mores.[217]  The ANSM [Australian National Socialist Movement] frustratedly characterized many Skinheads as

… a bunch of drugged out pisspots, backstabbers, traitors, cowards, time wasters, fantasizers, big mouths and in general anarchists … who refuse to take orders.[218]

Another organisation was Jack van Tongeren’s Australian Nationalist Movement (ANM), whose members were responsible for a terror campaign in Perth during the late 1980s, including firebombings, bashings, robberies, a bombing and a murder.  The ANM found skinheads somewhat useful but still looked down on them.

In a submission to the 1991 National Inquiry into Racist Violence in Australia, one ANM member spoke of skinheads who were assaulting anyone who tried to tear down the ANM’s “Asians Out or Racial War” posters.** He stated that:

They are ratbags, purely bigots and terrorists in my opinion. However, they do have one useful function. They ‘bodyguard’ a lot of our gear, including the posters, which cost seventeen cents each.

Similar tensions existed between skinheads and organised far-right groups across the world, but the Australian scene was particularly dysfunctional. By contrast, the UK’s National Front managed to organise skinheads on a scale never remotely achieved here.

A colleague of mine spoke to former neo-Nazis in Germany, who told an anecdote about how disappointed they were when they invited Australian skinheads to Germany in the mid-1990s. The Australian Nazis just wanted to get drunk and bash people rather than discuss the finer points of Mein Kampf.

This is consistent with Geoffrey Wright’s earlier point that “some of the street thugs had taken on certain political ideas and drew inspiration from their counterparts in Europe, and we saw it happening here in Melbourne.” A lot of the skinheads were not people who had become committed to neo-Nazi ideology and engaged in violence as a result, they were already violent thugs who then adopted neo-Nazism.

This makes Romper Stomper’s characterisation of its protagonists, as thrill-seeking and lacking organisation and political engagement, largely accurate. While the movie leaves out the organised activity that was occurring, it still captures a broad truth about Australia’s neo-Nazi skinhead scene at the time.

Something else that rang true was Wright’s portrayal of the gang’s disintegration following internal rifts and external pressure.

For Romper Stomper’s first thirty minutes the gang seems unstoppable. They carry out crimes with impunity, attract new members (Gabrielle and a group of skinheads from Canberra), and just party. But after they encounter some people who fight back, everything goes downhill for them, ending in fratricidal violence.

Most of Australia’s far-right extremist groups have comparable stories, particularly of internal conflict.

For example, after the Australian Nationalist Movement’s leading figures were arrested in Perth in 1989, two members murdered fellow activist David Locke who they wrongly suspected of being an informer.

On April 1991, while National Action leader Jim Saleam was on trial over a shotgun attack against the leader of the African National Congress in Sydney, one NA member murdered another member (ASIO listening devices installed in NA’s headquarters, where the murder occurred, helped secure the killer’s conviction).

So Romper Stomper tells a plausible story of the violence, dysfunction and downfall of a  neo-Nazi skinhead gang in Australia at the time.

Romper Stomper remains a work of fiction, but it’s a valuable one for anyone interested in far-right extremism or in racist violence in Australia. It tells a story of the most extreme and violent, but least organised or ideologically-engaged, subset of Australia’s far-right fringe.

As this post has shown, the movie has parallels with many real-life examples of such groups. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw an outbreak of far-right terror that Australia has not come close to seeing since (there was an attempt by the ANM to relaunch their violence in 2004, but it was foiled).

Many of the people involved in the violent far-right groups ended up dead, imprisoned or disillusioned, following a similar trajectory as portrayed in Romper Stomper. Their activities disappeared from public consciousness in the following two decades, and consequently this movie is remembered more than the real incidents on which it is loosely based.

Notes

* When I refer to skinheads in this post I’m talking about the neo-Nazi ones, even though most skinheads are not neo-Nazis.

** The ANM member didn’t state in the report that these individuals were necessarily skinheads, but other sources (media reports from the time and Tongeren’s autobiography) indicate that the ANM largely used skinheads for these footsoldier type tasks.

Update March 2017: Most of the links seem to have gone dead. I’ll update this post sometime with lots more sources.