In Trinidad and Tobago, officials are scrambling to deal with a new problem: young people are running to ISIS in droves from that area.
The United States is worried about having an ISIS breeding ground so close to its borders, as the island nation in the Caribbean continued to funnel its youth into extremism, and President Donald Trump has reportedly called Prime Minister Keith Rowley of Trinidad and Tobago in order to discuss security measures and the threat of terrorism, this according to a report from The New York Times.
Islamist extremism has found a home in the Caribbean country, which saw a failed coup in 1990 from a radical Muslim group, and ISIS in particular makes good use of its recruits from Trinidad and Tobago. Those recruits from that country rise up high in the ranks, and according to former United States ambassador, John L. Estrada and Trinidad’s minister of national security, Edmund Dillon, over one hundred people have made the trip from Trinidad and Tobago to Syria.
“Trinidadians do very well with ISIL,” Estrada said. “They are high up in the ranks, they are very respected and they are English-speaking. ISIL have used them for propaganda to spread their message through the Caribbean.”
In an attempt to curtail this radicalization, Trinidad and Tobago introduced amendments last week designed to boost security, though several of these measures have come under fire recently. One of these measures would criminalize membership in the Islamist State, while another would make it so that people traveling to certain areas would be required to prove that they were not doing so in order to take part in terrorist activities.
Imtiaz Mohammed, president of the Islamic Missionaries Guild, has heavily criticized the measures for making sweeping generalizations.
“You can’t just go to a court and have a judge tell you that you are guilty with no evidence, just an assumption,” he said.