broader Sunni community support for the anti-ISIS struggle remains impossible to achieve. As NPR reported in February 2015, the ‘US view on how to defeat ISIS involves making a deal with Sunnis like [tribal leader] Dabbash, and even incorporating their men into a sort of Iraqi National Guard. “The Guard is a breakthrough idea, because it will ensure that Iraqis are protected by people with whom they are familiar and in whom they have trust. It’ll break down some of the sectarian divide,” said US Secretary of State John Kerry. But that trust is sorely lacking among Dabbash and other Sunni leaders who have yet to show signs that they are ready to make a truce with the government in Baghdad.’
As long as they can count on support – or even lack of opposition – from Iraq’s Sunni tribes, and as long as the multi-party civil war continues to rage across Syria, ISIS is likely to maintain its power at a level vastly disproportionate to its size.
There is a long history of foreign militants or wannabe militants travelling to the greater Middle East region to join Islamist campaigns. Perhaps the best known in recent years is the massive influx of foreign fighters who travelled to Afghanistan throughout the 1980s to join the indigenous mujahideen, or holy warriors, fighting against the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. One of the most famous of these was Osama bin Laden. The mujahideen were armed by the CIA, paid by Saudi Arabia, trained by CIA allies in Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, and welcomed at the White House by President Ronald Reagan, who called them ‘freedom fighters’.
More recently, foreign fighters travelled to Iraq to join various militias – including extremist Islamist groups, some of them linked to al-Qaeda – to fight against the US occupation. But the numbers were never enough to have a determinative impact on the military balance of power.
From the first months of the Syrian civil war, foreign activists arrived to support the anti-Assad opposition. As the initial nonviolent political campaign morphed into devastating civil war, many more arrived as humanitarian aid workers, driving ambulances, helping distribute international assistance. As the Islamist forces among the anti-Assad opposition rose in power and began to take over the major military roles from the secular democratic opposition, more Muslims from around the world arrived to join them. In some of the Islamist organizations, foreign fighters soon outnumbered Syrians.
In early 2015, the New York Times chronicled the wide range of reasons for the surge of potential fighters flocking to Syria to join the most extremist organizations. ‘Young men in Bosnia and Kosovo are traveling to Syria for financial gain, including recruiting bonuses some groups offer, counterterrorism specialists say. Others from the Middle East and North Africa are attracted more by the ideology and the Islamic State’s self-declared status as a caliphate. Counterterrorism specialists have seen criminal gang members from as far as Sweden seeking adventure and violence in the fight.’
There is no question that the process of embracing extremist Islamism very often begins in response to long histories of dispossession, disenfranchisement, exclusion and denial of rights among immigrant, Muslim or particular Islamic sects, and other minority communities in countries around the world. In the US, federal and state government policies are in place that continue to marginalize Muslim, Arab and other immigrant communities. Members of those communities, particularly young people, are often targeted during wars in the Middle East. President Obama acknowledged that ‘engagement with communities can’t be a cover for surveillance. It can’t securitize our relationship with Muslim Americans, dealing with them solely through the prism of law enforcement.’ But he didn’t do or even propose anything to actually change the US and local state and municipal policies that do just this. Further, he made the statement at a conference designed to counter recruiting by ISIS and similar organizations, which was held a full seven months after he had ordered the bombing of Syria to begin.
In many European, American, and other Western Muslim communities, support for ISIS, al-Qaeda and other Islamist organizations exists despite, rather than because of, the violence of these groups. In 2013 and 2014, reports surfaced of European Muslims travelling to Syria to join ISIS with their entire families, babies and children included, to establish new lives in the so-called caliphate. At the end of 2014, the Washington Post profiled a British father, arriving in Syria to join ISIS with his family – his ‘first four children had been born in London, his native city, but his new baby, wrapped in a fuzzy brown onesie, was born in territory controlled by the Islamic state’.
For many supporters from Western countries, the embrace of ISIS or other extremist organizations is often rooted in longstanding grievances at home. Those include permanent unemployment, discrimination, poverty, political dispossession, anger at rising Islamophobia, and the sense of not belonging to their country despite being born and raised there. Laws in Europe that prohibit hate speech are widely seen as perpetuating double standards, since they prohibit antisemitism but allow racist and Islamophobic slurs under the guise of free expression. Paris imam Mehdi Bouzid spoke of Cherif Kouachi, one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers, saying: ‘We had lost him. Their message – the message [of radical Islam] – is tempting to those like Cherif. It promises them a place, acceptance, respect. They do not have that here.’
For some young people growing up in the squalid immigrant slums that surround many European cities, desperation and the lack of opportunity set the stage for often-petty criminal activity and sequential jail terms in violent prisons, which sometimes leads to indoctrination into some of the most radical versions of political Islam. Shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, the international press started paying attention to studies indicating that, as Reuters described it, ‘prison radicalization is a problem in countries ranging from Britain and the US to Afghanistan. However, France stands out because over half its inmates are estimated to be Muslim, many from communities blighted by poverty and unemployment.’ The disproportionate number of French prisoners who are Muslims, at 50 per cent compared to their estimated share of between 5 and 10 per cent of the population, reflects the same harsh reality that civil-rights attorney and author Michelle Alexander, in her seminal book The New Jim Crow, highlighted regarding African-Americans in US prisons: that the criminal justice system perpetuates racial inequality.
In one of the distinctions between ISIS and other jihadi organizations, including al-Qaeda, the declaration of a ‘caliphate’ has led ISIS to focus on recruiting professionals, such as doctors and engineers, and their families to come to live in this new quasi-state. Images of family life in the ‘caliphate’ form part of slick, web-based recruiting campaigns. In Raqqa, the ISIS ‘capital’ in Syria, thousands of local residents have been forced out, their homes distributed to ISIS fighters, supporters and their families, who also receive money, electricity and healthcare. Reportedly, education for children – boys and girls – is available, shaped by the ISIS version of Islam and sharia law. At the same time, extreme brutality – toward local civilians, particularly women, non-Muslims, anyone who opposes ISIS rule, anyone who differs from the ISIS leadership’s fanatical interpretations of Islam – remains the norm.
Is the typical ISIS fighter a Muslim of Middle Eastern descent?
Not all foreign supporters are coming from Western countries. As an imprisoned Saudi human rights activist told the Washington Post: ‘So many Saudis are engaged with the Islamic State because of the lack of political freedoms in our country. They are frustrated because they cannot express themselves.’ Describing young prisoners being recruited to join the Islamic State, he said: ‘It’s like committing suicide for them to join the Islamic State, but they feel that their lives don’t matter because of the injustice in this country. That’s what happens when people are deprived of their rights.’
But
