Australia’s Most Dangerous Islamic State Member: The Arrest of Neil Prakash
Australia’s Most Dangerous Islamic State Member: The Arrest of Neil Prakash
Neil Christopher Prakash was considered “the most important and the most dangerous” Australian member of Islamic State (IS) (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, May 5, 2016).Before being wounded and captured in 2016, he established a public profile under the nom de guerre Abu Khaled al-Cambodi and was connected to multiple terrorist plots inside Australia. The Australian government described him as “the principal Australian reaching back from the Middle East into terrorist networks in both Melbourne and Sydney” (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, May 5, 2016). His story serves as an example of how IS has used its high-profile foreign fighters to reach out to their compatriots at home to propagandize, recruit and instigate attacks.
Journey to Islamic State
Neil Prakash’s path to violent jihadism began with low-level criminality. He was born in Melbourne on May 7, 1991, and his father left the family soon after (The Australian, March 12, 2016; U.S. Department of Treasury, January 10, 2017). As he grew up, he had to care for his mother, who struggled with mental illness. After dropping out during his tenth year of school, Neil Prakash struggled to maintain employment, used drugs heavily, recorded hip hop songs under the name “Kree Dafa” and joined a gang based in Melbourne’s western suburbs.
In 2011, the leader of Prakash’s gang, disillusioned after serving six months in prison for assault, converted to Islam. In August 2012, Prakash followed suit, converting to Islam at a sports club in a prayer session led by Bosnian-born imam Harun Mehicivic (The Australian, March 12, 2016). Influenced by the crowd he converted with, Prakash did not join one of Melbourne’s mainstream Muslim communities, instead gravitating toward the radical fringe. Harun Mehicivic ran the al-Furqan Islamic Information Center in Springvale, which has been described by a judge as “openly supportive of Islamic State” and was closely scrutinized by Australian counter-terrorism authorities (Gaughan v Causevic, July 8, 2016).
Prakash attended al-Furqan several times after his conversion. This was a time when the flow of Western foreign fighters to Syria began to take off, which had ramifications in Australia. In August 2012, the death of an influential Sydney sheikh in Syria inspired a greater number of Australians to join the Syrian civil war (The Australian, August 22, 2012: Sydney Morning Herald, August 22, 2012). In September 2012, the Victorian Joint Counter-Terrorism team raided the homes of several people associated with al-Furqan following a reported assault on an Australian Security Intelligence Organization informant (Sydney Morning Herald, September 14, 2012). That same month, a violent protest occurred in Sydney against the film The Innocence of Muslims (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, September 16, 2012).
Prakash joined this small but perceptible wave of escalating extremist activity and left for Syria in 2013. The exact details of Prakash’s journey are unclear. However, he later told a Turkish court that before joining IS, he joined another Syrian-based armed movement, Ahrar al-Sham (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, April 27, 2017). A number of other Australians followed a similar path in joining IS. For example, the conviction of Sydney man Hamdi Alqudsi revealed a network that operated throughout 2013 to help Australians fight in Syria. This was done through coordination with Mohammad Ali Baryalei, an Australian who fought for both Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra before joining IS. Baryalei facilitated the entry of several Australians into these groups until he was killed in October 2014 (R v Alqudsi, September 1, 2016).
There is no indication that Prakash was part of this specific cohort, but it demonstrates that joining IS after initially joining Ahrar al-Sham was not an unusual pathway for Australian jihadists at the time. What was unusual, however, was how significant Prakash would become within Australia’s jihadist scene.
Islamic State Propagandist
Prakash appeared in the first video produced by IS’ English language media outlet al-Hayat, the June 2014 release “There Is No Life Without Jihad” (al-Hayat Media, June 19, 2014). The video summoned Westerners to join the battle. It featured two Australians and three Britons, including Reyaad Khan who would later facilitate attacks in the United Kingdom (UK). Prakash did not have a speaking role in this video, but he would come to gain prominence as part of the cohort of Raqqa-based Western-orientated propagandists, recruiters and radicalizers referred to by the FBI as “The Legion” (New York Times, November 24, 2016; CTC Sentinel, March 9, 2017; Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2017).
Prakash is featured as the primary subject of the April 2015 video “The Story of Abu Khaled al-Cambodi from Australia,” which was advertised in the 8th edition of Dabiq magazine (al-Hayat Media, March 30, 2015; al-Hayat Media, April 21, 2015). In the video, Prakash told the story of his conversion to Islam, as well as his radicalization and subsequent travel to Syria. He also praised Numan Haider, a Melbourne teenager who was shot dead after stabbing two police officers from the Victorian Joint Counter Terrorism team on September 23, 2014. Prakash claimed to have “known him personally,” which is plausible given both he and Haider regularly attended al-Furqan (Coroners Court of Victoria, July 31). Prakash ended the video by calling for further attacks, exhorting his “beloved brothers in Islam in Australia” to “start attacking before they attack you” (al-Hayat Media, April 21, 2015).
The video’s release coincided with a period of heightened activity by The Legion. Assessing this period of IS online activity, then-FBI Director James Comey stated that “their efforts to use the power of social media…peaked in the spring of 2015” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, March 23, 2017). Prakash’s significance in the overall Western cohort of IS foreign fighters is indicated by his being targeted in the U.S.-led effort to kill high-profile Western Islamic State figures, including Junaid Hussain, Raphael Hostey and Reyaad Khan (New York Times, November 24, 2016). Islamic State was using these foreign fighters to guide attacks in their home countries by communicating with supporters through online platforms to instigate violence and advise on target choices and attack methods, with Prakash serving as their key conduit to Australia from late 2014 (Security Challenges, 2016; Security Challenges, 2017).
Prakash as Attack Planner
Prakash’s role went beyond that of a propagandist. This became clear after April 2015, when the security services disrupted a plot by a Melbourne teenager to murder police officers on Anzac Day (an Australian military commemoration). The plot’s catalyst was the death of Numan Haider, the al-Furqan attendee who was killed while stabbing two counter-terrorism officers the previous September (Coroners Court of Victoria, July 31, 2017). In the following months, Haider’s friend Sevdet Besim, another al-Furqan attendee who had personally known Prakash before he left for Syria, sought revenge.
According to evidence later presented at Besim’s prosecution, Prakash had reached out to him through social media in late 2014 and encouraged him to carry out an attack in Australia. By early 2015, Prakash put Besim in contact with a 14-year-old in the UK who pretended to be an experienced jihadist with a wife and son. Besim told him that Prakash would send him the details of Australian Army personnel to murder. This did not eventuate, and the plot shifted to targeting police officers. The UK teenager took over the task of guiding the plot, though Prakash still played a role in the background (The Queen v Besim, September 5, 2016).
Prakash was involved in other international incidents. In April 2016, counter-terrorism raids prevented another terrorist plot timed for Anzac Day, this time by a Sydney-based teenager. A year earlier the plotter had been in online communication with Prakash, who reportedly encouraged him to carry out violence in Sydney to coincide with the Melbourne Anzac plot (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, April 26, 2016; Sydney Morning Herald, April 26, 2016). In May 2015, Prakash tweeted hoax bomb threats, which forced flights from Etihad, Lufthansa and Turkish Airlines to be diverted and grounded (Business Insider, May 15, 2016). The next year, the journalist Paul Maley reported that Prakash had tried to instigate his murder (The Australian, March 12, 2016).
Prakash was only a minor player among the Westerners within IS who plotted attacks in Europe and North America. Individuals such as Junaid Hussain, Raphael Hostey and Reyaad Khan played a larger role and were implicated in more attacks (CTC Sentinel, March 9, 2017). However, for Australia, Prakash was the most dangerous Islamic State member. In June 2015, the government listed him for financial sanctions under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1373 on the grounds that he had “sought to commission violent terrorist acts, including in Australia” (Minister for Foreign Affairs, June 4, 2015).
Prakash’s Downfall
On May 4, 2016, the Australian government announced that it had been informed by the U.S. government that Neil Prakash had been killed by an airstrike in Mosul (Department of Defense [Australia], May 04, 2016). Then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter referred to this as part of the United States’ “systematic effort to disrupt ISIL’s external operations by removing terrorists from the battlefield who are planning, directing or inspiring attacks against Americans,” adding that “we killed Neil Prakash, the last remaining member of an ISIL cell calling for lone wolf attacks in this country” (U.S. Department of Defense, May 13, 2016).
However, it was subsequently announced that Prakash had survived the airstrike and was in Turkish custody (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, November 26, 2016). Upon being arrested at the Turkish-Syrian border in October 2016, Prakash initially claimed a false identity, later admitting his true identity in March 2017 (Herald Sun, September 28, 2017). Prakash then testified to Turkish courts regarding his journey to Syria and claimed that he escaped the Islamic State after being wounded and spending time in a recovery center in Syria (The Guardian, August 13, 2017).
After the Australian foreign ministry issued a special permit to enable consular support to be provided to Prakash, Australian officials interviewed him several times (The Guardian, August 13, 2017). He has partially admitted a role in promoting Islamic State in Australia, stating that “I had something to do with [it], but I was not 100 percent responsible.” (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, September 29, 2017). In November 2016, the Australian government requested his extradition, but he is first facing charges in Turkey. If extradited to Australia, he will face charges for a number of terrorism-related offences (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, November 26, 2016; Sydney Morning Herald, September 28, 2017).
Despite having once been Australia’s most dangerous IS member, Prakash’s removal from the battlefield and potential prosecution is unlikely to have a dramatic effect on the country’s jihadist threat. Australia has experienced five jihadist attacks and prevented over a dozen alleged plots since September 2014 (Australian Security Intelligence Organization, 2017); the scale of the threat suggests that bringing any one individual to justice, however necessary, will not have a decisive impact.
