Los Angeles gangsters on Syria's battlefield a rarity, experts assure

Flaunting high-caliber rifles, dozens of tattoos and the nicknames “Wino” and “Creeper,” the two bragging men look like those in many other homemade videos of Los Angeles gang members that have proliferated on YouTube over the past decade — only this one has a weird twist.

Firing off expletives and bullets and calling out to their LA “homies,” the two claim to be “on the frontlines” of Syria's brutal civil war, fighting alongside Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations assisting the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

One of them is Nersis Kilajian, a self-described member of the Westside Armenian Power Gang that is tied to the Russian mob, according to an analysis of the footage by the Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute. The institute said that the other man is Ayee Peeyakan, who claims on the video to be an associate of Sur-13 or the “Surenos,” a Hispanic crime syndicate affiliated with Mexican Mafia prison gangs nationwide. Dating his messages on Facebook, the institute concluded that he had been in Syria since December.

CNN, however, has reported that Peeyakan really is just another alias for Sarou Madarian, an ex-member of the Grumpy Wynos gang that is traced by authorities to the larger North Hollywood Boyz clique and, through their drug trafficking, to Sur-13. Court documents obtained by the Tribune-Review show the group has been involved in bloody turf battles in the Cantara and Coldwater Canyon sections of North Hollywood.

Facebook acquaintances suggested that both men are not American citizens and had been deported from the United States to the Middle East for unspecified criminal activities, the institute reported. The Trib found criminal records from Phoenix and California on Kilajian, 31. Glendale, Calif., police Sgt. Thomas R. Lorenz told the Trib that Kilajian had numerous “run-ins with all agencies in LA County.”

Although the Trib could find no criminal records on Madarian, experts who study the foreign-fighter phenomenon said that they are not shocked to see American gangbangers with ties to Russian and Mexican crime cartels turn up in Syria, especially if they were originally from there.

“It's not surprising when you look at the evolution of warfare over the past 15 years — foreign fighters often are drawn to conflicts because of ideology, religion or just the thirst for adventure. When you see these two guys, you get the sense that they see Syria as a real hard man's arena to test themselves,” said Michael Noonan, an Army combat veteran of the war in Iraq and director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

Experts would not rule out the possibility of radicalized Westerners traveling to Syria and other Middle East and Africa battlegrounds and returning as terrorists. The United Kingdom's Security Service has long considered London a likely target of former fighters trickling back, with its MI-5 counterterrorism section warning that Syria poses “an increasingly significant potential source of future threats to the U.K. and U.K. interests overseas.”

However, research by Clinton Watts, a former Army commander and FBI special agent who studies transnational terror and crime networks, found that the small number of Western jihadists is dwarfed by the glut of volunteers streaming to Middle Eastern hotspots from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region.

Analyzing a trove of al-Qaida documents seized in Sinjar, Iraq, in 2007, Watts counted 563 fighters entering Anbar province to fight against U.S. troops as holy warriors, but only five were from Western Europe and none was American.

In today's civil wars, a fighter's country of origin might not even be the most important thing about him.

David Betz, a leading expert on armed insurgencies at King's College London, said the world is becoming “increasingly neo-medieval” as nation states break down and people live digital lives. That explains a video showing heavily armed ex-U.S. gang members addressing pals around the globe from the frontlines of a civil war in the Middle East.

“What's the primary identity of these guys? It's not American,” Betz said. “Their world, to judge from the clip, consists of them and their ‘homies' with everyone else being some variety of a (fellow gang member).

“Five hundred years ago, they'd have been preying on the peasants of one feudal potentate on behalf of another,” he said. “If the dynamic is changing, I think it's because technological developments are ungluing the form of sociopolitical organization that has prevailed in the West for the last few centuries.”

Watts, the former executive officer of West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, said the video might be showcasing human and weapons trafficking rings merging with terror syndicates, with both groups exploiting the conflict to make money by smuggling in guns and volunteers or seizing control of lucrative resources.

“So with the Armenian you have what appears to be a gang member who is part of organized crime and linked to the Russian mob in Los Angeles. There might be some overlap there with other violent networks — terror and crime — that operate in Syria,” Watts said.

“To me, what's really interesting is that we're talking about a foreign fighter arriving in Syria to help the Assad government. Most of our focus has been on the Sunni Arab militias, those jihadists ... not guys like these two.”

In recent testimony before Congress, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper estimated that 7,500 foreign fighters from 50 nations have been drawn to the Sunni Arab militias in Syria. He gave no figures on Americans there, and he did not know how many of these fighters were likely to return home and sow terror with the battlefield skills they learn.

In July, the Trib reported the death in Syria of former Pittsburgh resident Amiir Farouk Ibrahim, 32. Although he held an American passport, Ibrahim did not appear to be training for terrorist strikes in the United States. He was instead a low-ranking gunman who was killed in a compound held by Al Sham and the Islamic State of Iraq, armed Sunni Arab terror organizations fighting the Damascus dictatorship.

On his Facebook page, Ibrahim seemed to be an educated young man who had studied jihadist political thought and was drawn to join other native Egyptians streaming north to Syria in an era of Arab Spring revolutions.

“I'm sure that the guys in the video can't even point on a map where they were,” Watts said. “At least with the jihadists, they know where they are and why they're there.”

Carl Prine is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at 412-320-7826 or cprine@tribweb.com.