Italian counter-terrorism authorities are monitoring several dozen Italian Muslims who have obtained combat experience in Syria and are now promoting jihad, or holy war, in Italy.
Somewhere between 45 and 50 Italian citizens -- mostly Muslim immigrants from North Africa, but also some Italian converts to Islam -- have been to Syria at least once to fight alongside rebel forces seeking to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Many of these individuals, including several women, have returned to Italy and are using the Internet to spread jihadist propaganda and to communicate with other Islamic radicals.
Some of the Italian jihadists have links with a Belgian Salafist group, "Sharia4Belgium," and are actively seeking to recruit fellow Muslims to overthrow the democratic order in Italy, according to Italian law enforcement officials.
The revelations were made after a 24-year-old convert to Islam, Giuliano Ibrahim Delnevo, became the first Italian to die in Syria. Delnevo, who was raised in a Roman Catholic home in the northern Italian port city of Genoa, converted to Islam at the age of 20 after meeting a woman during a visit to Morocco.
In an interview with the daily newspaper Il Giornale, the director of Italy's Security Intelligence Department (DIS), Giampiero Massolo, said that Delnevo became increasingly radicalized due to exposure to Islamic propaganda on the Internet.
For example, in a television interview filmed shortly after his conversion to Islam, a youthful and impressionable Delnevo talks about his experience at a celebration to mark the end of the Muslim holiday of Ramadan. The event, held at a middle school in Albenga, a town on the Gulf of Genoa, was attended by more than 500 townspeople.
More recently, however, Delnevo began uploading videos onto YouTube in which he lashed out at cartoonists depicting Mohammed in a negative light. Visibly intoxicated by Islam, Delnevo also recited verses from the Koran and demanded that Italy withdraw its troops from Afghanistan.
Delnevo first travelled to the Turkish border with Syria sometime in 2012, where he came into contact with a group of Chechen jihadists and quickly became swallowed-up by the lure of Islamic fundamentalism and holy war.
In September 2012, for instance, Delnevo posted the following quote from the late Abdullah Azzam -- a Palestinian preacher known as the "Father of Global Jihad" -- on his Facebook page: "We are jihadists and jihad is an obligation to believe in Allah." In March 2013, Delnevo replaced the photo of himself on his Facebook page with the logo of the Kavkaz Center, a well-known Chechen website that publishes jihadist propaganda. By the middle of June 2013, Delnevo was found dead on a battlefield in northern Syria.
According to Massolo, Delnevo was a "lone wolf" who became indoctrinated by "a powerful form of self-training." Massolo continues that although the "phenomenon of jihadist recruitment is much less prevalent" in Italy than in other European countries, "it is clear that the situation in general does not allow us to sit back and needs to be monitored. In some cases, they decide to take direct action and join jihadist fighters."
