"It's a troubled community as a group," said Greg Barton, director of the Global Terrorism Research Centre at Monash University. "So they're over-represented in petty crime, in organized crime, in religious extremism."
When the civil war erupted in Syria in 2011, the fighting was a draw for many Lebanese Muslim families in Australia. Clannishness and old family networks made it easy for youngsters from the
community to slip away and join the fighting.
"You had people from the neighborhood and you flew into Tripoli or flew into Beirut and drove up to Tripoli and were taken across," Barton said.
"It was a very smooth, easy pathway in."
Both police and academics, however, struggle to explain what would draw second-generation Australians back to the violence which their parents had fled.
Aftab Malik, a Scholar-in-Residence at Sydney's Lebanese Muslim Association who has spent years living in western Sydney's Muslim community, said he believed the convergence between radical Islam and organized crime was unique to Australia.
"I haven't come across that in the U.S. or in Great Britain. It's quite specific here and I don't know why that is," he said.
