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DURHAM – The arrest of seven North Carolina men on charges they were planning a “violent jihad” overseas has piqued the interest of local and national terrorism experts hoping to learn more from what happened.

David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security and a professor at Duke University, said if the allegations are true, it’s one more case of so-called homegrown terrorists.

“Over the past seven years, we’ve had a number of these types of incidents where an individual radicalized other people that he knew, impressionable youth, and then they planned these types of activities,” Schanzer said.

Experts said attack plots can be domestic, like the five men convinced last year of plotting to kill soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey, though Schanzer said most are not planned to happen overseas, and groups are less organized here.

“Actually, compared to populations in Europe and elsewhere in the world, wee see this trend of radicalizing people here in the United States to be very rare,” he said.

Research groups like the one in the Triangle and the Terrorism Research Center located outside Washington, D.C., are looking to understand the mindset of the radicals and how they’re recruited.

“You have individuals that are looking to attach themselves to a particular cause. You have people like John Walker Lindh that want to go overseas and try to grab hold of an organization and feel like they belong,” Walter Purdy, vice president of the Terrorism Research Center, said.

The North Carolina suspects identify themselves as Muslim, but Purdy pointed out that attacks also come from people of all extreme ideologies.

“Understanding this particular type of enemy is important,” he said. “What we try to do at the Terrorism Research Center is spend time, hopefully, looking at what are the root causes and what are those indicators that somebody needs to be looking at in the future.”