Neutral Switzerland’s Growing Islamist and Jihadist Challenge
25th March 2020
Switzerland is not generally seen as a center for radical Islamism, and compared to countries like Belgium and France, the radicalized population is small. Nonetheless, there are worrisome portents for the country’s future. A Federal Office of Police (FEDPOL) report released earlier this year on the Swiss jihadist and would-be jihadist population from 2012 to 2018 showed that the majority were radicalized in Switzerland, although 60 percent of them were born abroad. In fact, Jean-Paul Rouiller, director of the Geneva Centre for Training and Analysis of Terrorism, noted in an interview with Tribune de Geneve in 2017 that “we’re no longer seeing imported jihadism. A hotbed of Swiss jihadists is being created […] made up of people who grew up in Switzerland.”