
The following is a guest post by Dr. Mark Silinsky, author of Jihad and the West: Black Flag over Babylon. Focusing on the relationship between ISIS and Western countries, Silinsky's work provides a detailed and chilling explanation of the appeal of the Islamic State and how those abroad become radicalized, while also analyzing the historical origins, inner workings, and horrific toll of the Caliphate. Here, he discusses a puzzling and troubling phenomenon: Westerners who leave their homes to join up with ISIS.
Message to Europe - The Blue-eyed Jihad is Coming Home
“The Revolution is like Saturn. It devours its own Children.” Georg Büchner, Danton’s Death, 1835
“My iPod is broken. I want to come back.” A young French Jihadist’s tweet to his parents in France
As the Caliphate - also called the Islamic State, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and the Islamic State in Syria and the Sham - collapses, many of its surviving Western-born cadre, the Blue-eyed Jihad, are scrambling to leave. Not all European, American, Canadian and Australian Caliphate fighters want to leave. Some have built new lives and found important positions. Some Westerners have died, often in combat, and are buried in what became their homeland. But many have not found what they had hoped to find in the Caliphate and want to return to the West, after grim living. There are four groupings of reasons why they want to come home: survival, disappointment, fear, and that cruelty was not in their nature.
Reason One—Survival
Many Westerners are desperate to leave so that they can live. Their friends have died, and they know that they are on somebody’s death list. If they are not killed by assassination, they might succumb to disease or wither through privation. It might be a quick death or a long, agonizing death. But, they have had enough and don’t want to die. They want out.
Reason Two- Disappointment and Discomfort
“Syrian woman backbiting us [me and my Australian sister] while we’re sitting in front of her, thinking that I don’t speak Arabic.” - A British woman called Umm Rayyan
Many blue-eyed, suburban recruits did not find what they wanted. For some Westerners, there is a gap between what they expected in the Caliphate and what they found. Many did not find the enchanting village they were promised. The roasting temperatures and inadequate air conditioning are enervating. The stabbing heat provides the perfect climate for exotic bugs and diseases, including neglected tropical diseases that are mostly unknown in the West, to flourish. The searing temperatures, boutique diseases, and sand flies are not advertised in the Caliphate's recruitment brochures. Some have blogged that their assigned tasks are menial or unfulfilling. There are few luxury goods or cars left. Male fighters are offered beautiful and nubile brides as well as sex slaves, but many are not as eye-catching or sexually enthusiastic as promised. Also, the days of abundant sex are gone.
Beyond the weather, diseases, and tedious lifestyle, many Westerners are also astonished by the hatred the locals show them. Most of the land ISIS held is gone and the long-time inhabitants are less fearful of telling the few remaining foreign fighters the truth about what they think of them. Westerners expect to be welcomed as liberators but are seen as occupiers and thieves. They have heard comments such as “You are here to sabotage my country; you are coming to force something on us.” Increasingly they hear, “Soon you will die like the rest.”
Also, some of the few remaining Westerners are repulsed by the etiquette of their compatriots. They find the Middle Easterners, particularly the Arabs, to be vulgar and inconsiderate. One Briton blogged about the initial shock and then steady fatigue he experienced trying to grapple with the peevish behavior and brazen theft of personal property. They miss European table manners.
Many Western women never fully adjust to Jihadi living. They do not like to share their husbands with other women. Young women in search of benevolent and “caring” mother figures may be similarly lured. Sometimes they find them. But cowives are not always friends; they compete against each other for their husband’s affections and lovemaking and for prestige and place in the household. Some of the household chores have a morbid twist; for example, the more talented seamstresses are impressed into sewing suicide vests.
Reason Three — Fear of the Caliphate
A third reason for Westerners wanting to leave the Caliphate is that they fear it. Some Western men and women live in constant fear. One young man wrote, “They want to send me to the front, but I don’t know how to fight.” Westerners discover, often too late, that fellow Jihadis are killed for trivial offenses. Those who ask to return home are sometimes forced into suicide operations. The Islamic State kills anyone from their own cadre who tries to leave. It has executed hundreds of its own foreign fighters who tried to flee Raqqa. Some make it out of Syria, but some are stranded in Turkey, where they are hunted down by agents of the Caliphate.
Western fighters do not know whom to trust. One described the situation: “It [the Caliphate’s security and intelligence service(s)] is a highly organized body, with very strong discipline. Everybody spies on everybody else.” There is cybersecurity. In the shadowy world, the few remaining cybercafes are often the only means by which Westerners can communicate with their friends and family. For this reason, the Caliphate’s security operatives have installed software that records keystrokes. But, as of this writing, few cybercafes still exist.
Most escapees need to reach Turkey, where there are consular offices that can help them. Defections began as a trickle and then poured by spring 2016 and, as of winter 2017, they keep coming. Defectors arrive in singles, doubles, or small groups, usually disheveled and desperate. As one would-be defector explained, “We don’t know where to go. We want to go further away, but Europe is too expensive,” he said. “We know people are after us and want to kill us. We feel lost.”
Reason Four — Cruelty Was Not in Their Nature
The fourth reason Westerners want to come home is the realization that they are not emotionally suited for the cruelty of the State. Some Western Jihadis relish the brutality they inflict on their enemies. Sadists are comfortable in the Caliphate today. But many people cannot witness this cruelty without becoming traumatized. The reality of war is not what they expected.
The State requires recruits to prove allegiance by hurting people. Some eagerly do so. One Caliphate supporter prepared to kill humans by slitting the throats of rabbits. Later, he would stab to death a French police officer and his wife in Paris in summer 2016. Many recruits realize that killing people would be too difficult. In the words of one recruit, “They told us, ‘When you capture someone, you will behead them.’ But as for me, I have never even beheaded a chicken. It is not easy . . . I can’t do that.” A New Yorker who joined and then left the State in 2016 warned his fellow Americans to “avoid the worst decision” he ever made. “I did see severed heads placed on spiked poles . . . I just blocked them out.”
Some Westerners break out of the Caliphate. One British escapee explained, from hiding in Turkey, that she feared for her life every day. She was convinced that the State is tracking her down as a traitor. “I am a young girl. I want to live my life. I want to travel, go to cafes, meet friends like any normal girl.” Another said, “This is not the 1001 Nights.”
Summary
Most of the remaining Westerners in what is left of the Caliphate are desperate to get out. The State’s response it to kill all those they suspect of trying to leave. They try to stop the Western flight by burying defectors alive, burning them to death, shooting them, or being macabrely creative with their killing skills. But, some Westerners are elated with their new lives in the Caliphate, finding the prestige, power, and comradery that eluded them in the West. Last year, in Raqqa, a young woman phoned her European mother, who was weeping at the other end of the line, and said that she had not traveled to Syria just to return to Europe. She was at home in the Caliphate, and she was there to stay. Today, she may be dead in an unmarked grave somewhere in what was the Caliphate. Her mother may not know and cries when she thinks about it.
This represents the opinions of Dr. Silinsky and not the views of the US Army or any agency of the US government.
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