Last month, instead of coming home from school, two teenagers left their valley high in the Caucasus and went off to war. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, a 20 year-old stole her friend’s passport to make the same hazardous journey. From New Zealand came a former security guard; from Canada, a hockey fan who loved to fish and hunt.
And there have been many more: From 16,000 to 17,000 men, according to one independent Western estimate, and a small number of women from about 90 countries have streamed to Syria and Iraq to wage war for the Islamic State group.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group’s leader, has appealed to Muslims throughout the world to move to lands under its control — to fight, but also to work as administrators, physicians, judges, engineers and scholars, and to marry, put down roots and start families.
“Every person can contribute something to the Islamic State,” Canadian Islamic State member Andre Poulin said in a videotaped statement used for online recruitment.
“You can easily earn yourself a higher station with God almighty for the next life by sacrificing just a small bit of this worldly life,” Poulin said.
The contingent of foreigners taking up arms on behalf of the group formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant during the past three and a half years is more than twice as many as the French Foreign Legion. The conflict in Syria and Iraq has now drawn more volunteer fighters than past Muslim extremist causes in Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia — and an estimated eight out of 10 enlistees have joined the Islamic State group.
Following major losses in both Syria and Iraq, Islamic State fighters appear to have a second wind in recent days, capturing Ramadi, capital of Iraq’s largest Sunni province, and the ancient city of Palmyra, famous for its 2,000-year-old ruins.
Battle-hardened Bosnians and Chechens, prized for their experience and elan under fire and other religious zealots untested in combat, are eager to die for their faith.
They include about 3,300 people from western Europe and 100 or so from the US, according to the International Center for the Study of Radicalization (ICSR), a think tank at King’s College London.
From 10 to 15 percent of the enlistees are believed to have died in action. Hundreds of others are thought to have survived and returned home; their governments now worry about consequences.
“We all share the concern that fighters will attempt to return to their home countries or regions and look to participate in or support terrorism and the radicalization to violence,” US National Counterterrorism Center Director Nicholas Rasmussen told a US Senate hearing earlier this year.
“Just like Osama bin Laden started his career in international terrorism as a foreign fighter in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the next generation of Osama bin Ladens are currently starting theirs in Syria and Iraq,” ICSR director Peter Neumann told a White House summit on combating extremist violence in February.
One problem in choking off the flow of recruits has been the variety of their profiles and motives.
Associated Press reporters on five continents tracked some of those who joined the Islamic State group and found it is people born into the Muslim faith as well as converts, adventurers, educated professionals and people struggling to cope with disappointing lives who join.
“There is no typical profile,” according to a study by German security authorities obtained by reporters.
The study reported that among people leaving Germany for Syria for “Islamic extremist motives,” 65 percent were believed to have criminal records. They are aged from 15 to 63. About 61 percent were German-born, and one in 10 are female.
In contrast, John Horgan, a psychologist who directs the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, found some common traits among US recruits or would-be recruits for jihad. Typically, he said, they are in their late teens or early 20s, though a few have been in their mid-30s.
“From a psychological perspective, many of them are at a stage in their lives where they are trying to find their place in the world — who they are, what their purpose is,” Horgan said. “They certainly describe themselves as people who are struggling with conflict. They are trying to reconcile this dual identity of being a Muslim and being a Westerner, or being an American.”
Some are driven by religious zeal to protect the caliphate, or Muslim theocracy, that the Islamic State has proclaimed in the one-third of Syrian and Iraqi territory now considered to be under its control; others are thrilled by the chance to join what they see as a secret and forbidden club. Some appear to enlist because their peers do.
“What they have in common is that they are young, they are impressionable and they are hungry for excitement,” Horgan said.
Once recruits arrive in areas held by the extremists, they appear to receive only rudimentary military training — including how to load and fire a Kalashnikov assault rifle.
Nonetheless, they have been involved in “some of the most violent forms of attacks” by the group, including suicide bombings and filmed decapitations of foreigners, said William Braniff, executive director for the University of the Maryland-based National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism research center.
Areeb Majeed, 23, from a suburb of Mumbai, India, reportedly joined the Islamic State in May last year and fought for six months, killing up to 55 people and taking a gunshot to the chest.
He eventually called his parents from Turkey and asked to come home, Indian newspapers have reported.
Majeed’s chief complaint, officials from India’s National Investigation Agency were quoted as saying, was that the group did not pay him and made him clean toilets and haul water on the battlefield.
Often, though, the foreign combatants use social media to serve as “role models and facilitators for the next volunteers,” Braniff said.
“Before I came here to Syria, I had money, I had a family, I had good friends, it was not like I was some anarchist or somebody who just wants to destroy the world, to kill everybody,” Canadian Islamic State recruiter Poulin said. “Put God almighty before your family, put it before yourself, put it before everything. Put Allah before everything,” Braniff said
Poulin’s jihad ended in August last year; he was reported killed during an assault on a government-controlled airfield in northern Syria.
According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp, he had recruited five others from Toronto to come fight for the Islamic State group before he died.
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