Terrorists misusing mentally impaired people: Columnist

Press TV has interviewed Jim W. Dean, a columnist with the Veterans Today from Atlanta, about the fact that Syrian bomber of a recent explosion in Ansbach, Germany, pledged allegiance to the Daesh Takfiri group.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: As we’ve just been listening to what some of the German officials have to say about this recent attack in Ansbach, the perpetrator had a history of mental illness at the same time declares allegiance to Daesh or ISIL. What do you make of that?

Dean: Well, this is right out of ISIL's playbook. The real jihadi terrorists have been taking advantage of mentally impaired people for years, I remember in Iraq where they were taken women basically had some kind of mental illness and giving them a package to deliver to someone and giving them a hundred dollars and they didn't even know that it was a bomb.

So, they’ve used people like this as counterpart. And unfortunately, once the refugees [came], you have a lot of people that have post-traumatic stress syndrome. I listened to a program by a German psychiatrist on it today and he said there are really the number of refugees the mental counseling the tremendous trauma that they've been on is way beyond Germany's capacity really to handle them. And these people are very fertile time bombs for ISIL to recruit. Usually, they've done this through the internet but hopefully the police will be able to track down where some of these bomb parts came from to see if he was in contact physically with someone from ISIL but this is a bad sign if people are going to start moving to using bombs now.

Press TV: It's on just this recent attack in Germany let's take a look at the wider picture as far as much of Europe is concerned the recent attack in Nice for example there is that concern of that blowback that these Western governments are seeing because of their policies when it came to Syria. Now, there are many analysts who say that the easiest way to stop that is stop funding and supporting those terrorist groups that are wreaking havoc in Syria. What would you say to that?

Dean: Well, it's certainly not going to do that because they're never going to admit that they're doing that. And there hasn't been enough pressure from the media and also the major institutions, none of the think tanks, the churches haven't come out against them, none of the veterans groups. And a lot of people know better the Veterans Today is really the only veterans group or intelligence related of platform in the US that's really talking about any of this in the community itself.

Everybody else just wants to stay out of it because it’s viewed as very very dangerous to talk about and point out who's really involved in this in the West. But with that said, there certainly is no shortage of disgruntled jihadis and they're under the cover of doing this for religious reasons. A lot of these folks are just losers, a lot of them are hoodlums, hoodlums that come from criminal backgrounds. And now this is just an excuse for them to pick up a gun and be the big man and not and kill some people. And so it's a sad thing and I'm afraid we're going to see more of it before it's over.

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