Why join ISIS?

The Atlantic published an interesting piece yesterday, titled “Why Join ISIS?”. It summarizes the findings by Quantum Communications, which analyzed the statements of 49 current and former ISIS fighters to determine their motivations for joining ISIS. You can read more at The Atlantic, but here is the summary. The Quantum researchers grouped the fighters into nine categories, based on the reasons they gave for joining ISIS or other extremist groups. They are:

• Status seekers: Intent on improving “their social standing” these people are driven primarily by money “and a certain recognition by others around them.”
• Identity seekers: Prone to feeling isolated or alienated, these individuals “often feel like outsiders in their initial unfamiliar/unintelligible environment and seek to identify with another group.” Islam, for many of these provides “a pre-packaged transnational identity.”
• Revenge seekers: They consider themselves part of a group that is being repressed by the West or someone else.
• Redemption seekers: They joined ISIS because they believe it vindicates them, or ameliorates previous sinfulness.
• Responsibility seekers: Basically, people who have joined or support ISIS because it provides some material or financial support for their family.
• Thrill seekers: Joined ISIS for adventure.
• Ideology seekers: These want to impose their view of Islam on others.
• Justice seekers: They respond to what they perceive as injustice. “The justice seekers’ ‘raison d’être’ ceases to exist once the perceived injustice stops,” the report says.
• Death seekers: These people “have most probably suffered from a significant trauma/loss in their lives and consider death as the only way out with a reputation of martyr instead of someone who has committed suicide.”

The researchers also categorized the various influences that led to the fighters joining ISIS, which are counted up in this chart:

From the article:

Perhaps one of the most important findings is that the fighters’ motivations tended to vary by their country of origin.

Foreign fighters in the sample from places like the United States and Western Europe were far more likely to be facing some sort of identity crisis, a desire for a personal sense of recognition that ISIS can provide. They were also more likely to be motivated by a rejection of Western culture. A story in The New York Times over the summer, titled “ISIS and the Lonely Young American” detailed how ISIS sympathizers made contact with a curious and socially isolated Westerner and then manufactured a sense of community and belonging through constant online interaction (not simply one-way messaging, as some have suggested).

People in the sample who joined ISIS or similar groups from another Muslim country, however, were far more motivated by the perceived plight of the Syrian Sunnis. For this group, the report found that “assisting Muslim ‘brothers’ and fighting the Assad regime are the most common catalysts (45 percent).” They were primarily thrill and status seekers.

The fact that joining ISIS or a similar group could improve one’s immediate social status underscores how differently ISIS is perceived in the Arab world than in the West.

Sunni fighters primarily from Syria and Iraq were also motivated by money and status. “Internal fighters believe they have a mission to defend their community (duty, Jihad) but they also have personal interests (money, staying alive),” according to the report.

It quotes one jihadist: “He asked me, ‘Why don’t you join us … leave your work and consider me your financier.’”

Clearly, a survey of 49 people is not a scientific poll, but it does give some insight as to the varied themes that attract individuals to ISIS. One thing it reinforces is the degree to which Shia-Sunni conflicts dominate, as well as the extent to which money is a motivating factor.

In any event, the article goes on to describe efforts, both current and planned, to “reach the group’s target audiences with something more appealing.” As I was saying to Rusty in the comments of my previous post, as long as there are recruits, ISIS will continue to survive, if not thrive. The key to neutralizing ISIS is to cut off the flow of recruits, and the key to doing that is to make ISIS a less attractive (indeed, completely unattractive) options to the alternatives.

A Sunday Long Read

In the wake of the tragedy in Paris, this long article, “The Other France,” by George Packer (from August) in The New Yorker is worth a read. The issue of Islamist extremism is complex, and despite the rhetoric of conservative thought leaders and Republican presidential candidates, it will sadly not be easily or quickly solved. (Another article by David Ignatius at The Atlantic traces the history of ISIS and is worth a read as well.)

The opening paragraphs of Packer’s article:

Fouad Ben Ahmed never paid much attention to Charlie Hebdo. He found the satirical magazine to be vulgar and not funny, and to him it seemed fixated on Islam, but he didn’t think that its contributors did real harm. One of its cartoonists, Stéphane Charbonnier, also drew for Le Petit Quotidien, a children’s paper to which Ben Ahmed subscribed for his two kids. On January 7th, upon hearing that two French brothers with Algerian names, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, had executed twelve people at the Charlie Hebdo offices—including Charbonnier—in revenge for covers caricaturing Muhammad, Ben Ahmed wrote on Facebook, “My French heart bleeds, my Muslim soul weeps. Nothing, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, can justify these barbaric acts. Don’t talk to me about media or politicians who would play such-and-such a game, because there’s no excuse for barbarism. #JeSuisCharlie.”

That night, Ben Ahmed left his house, in the suburbs outside Paris, and went into the city to join tens of thousands of people at a vigil. He is of Algerian and Tunisian descent, with dark skin, and a few white extremists spat threats at him, but Ben Ahmed ignored them—France was his country, too. On January 11th, he joined the one and a half million citizens who marched in unity from the Place de la République.

Ben Ahmed’s Facebook page became a forum for others, mostly French Muslims, to discuss the attacks. Many expressed simple grief and outrage; a few aired conspiracy theories, suggesting a plot to stigmatize Muslims. “Let the investigators shed light on this massacre,” Ben Ahmed advised. One woman wrote, “I fear for the Muslims of France. The narrow-minded or frightened are going to dig in their heels and make an amalgame”—conflate terrorists with all Muslims. Ben Ahmed agreed: “Our country is going to be more divided.” He defended his use of #JeSuisCharlie, arguing that critiques of Charlie’s content, however legitimate before the attack, had no place afterward. “If we have a debate on the editorial line, it’s like saying, ‘Yes—but,’ ” he later told me. “In these conditions, that is unthinkable.”

Ben Ahmed, who is thirty-nine, works as a liaison between residents and the local government in Bondy—a suburb, northeast of Paris, in an area called Department 93. For decades a bastion of the old working class and the Communist Party, the 93 is now known for its residents of Arab and African origin. To many Parisians, the 93 signifies decayed housing projects, crime, unemployment, and Muslims. France has all kinds of suburbs, but the word for them, banlieues, has become pejorative, meaning slums dominated by immigrants. Inside the banlieues are the cités: colossal concrete housing projects built during the postwar decades, in the Brutalist style of Le Corbusier. Conceived as utopias for workers, they have become concentrations of poverty and social isolation. The cités and their occupants are the subject of anxious and angry discussion in France. Two recent books by the eminent political scientist Gilles Kepel, “Banlieue de la République” and “Quatre-vingt-treize” (“Ninety-three”), are studies in industrial decline and growing segregation by group identity. There’s a French pejorative for that, too: communautarisme.

After the Charlie massacre—and after a third terrorist, Amedy Coulibaly, gunned down a black policewoman outside a Jewish school and four Jews at a kosher supermarket—there was a widespread feeling, in France and elsewhere, that the killings were somehow related to the banlieues. But an exact connection is not easy to establish. Although these alienated communities are increasingly prone to anti-Semitism, the profiles of French jihadists don’t track closely with class; many have come from bourgeois families. The sense of exclusion in the banlieues is an acute problem that the republic has neglected for decades, but more jobs and better housing won’t put an end to French jihadism.

Ben Ahmed has lived in the 93 his entire life. A few years ago, he and his wife, Carolina, and their two children moved into a small house near Charles de Gaulle Airport. They wanted to be near a private school that the children attend, because most public schools in the 93 are overcrowded and chaotic, and staffed by younger, less qualified teachers. Ben Ahmed spent his teens in one of the toughest suburbs, Bobigny, in a notorious cité called l’Abreuvoir. During his twenties and early thirties, Ben Ahmed was employed by the Bobigny government as a community organizer, working with troubled youth—some of them his friends and neighbors, many just out of prison or headed there. His authority on life in the cités exceeds that of any scholar.

After the attacks, Ben Ahmed wrote an open letter to President François Hollande titled “All Partly Responsible, but Not Guilty.” He identified himself as a banlieue resident who had often “seen death a few metres from me.” He wrote about the problems of joblessness, discrimination, and collective withdrawal from society. He recalled that, in October, 2001, a soccer game in Paris between France and Algeria—the first such match since Algerian independence, in 1962—had to be called off when thousands of French youths of North African origin booed the “Marseillaise” and invaded the field, some chanting, “Bin Laden, bin Laden!” The French public responded with righteous revulsion. “The problem was before our eyes,” Ben Ahmed wrote. “But instead of asking good questions, we chose stigmatization, refusal of the other.” He went on, “The split was born on that day, the feeling of rejection expressed by the political class, when we could have asked other questions: What’s wrong? What’s the problem?”

The Least Worst Option

Iraq is devolving into open civil warfare, with the extremist group ISIS taking over cities and threatening to push into Baghdad. A number of things brought it to this point, including the “De-Ba’athification” instituted by the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003, the readiness level of the Iraqi military, and the utter failure and corruption of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. We are left with an Iraqi state that is no state at all. There is no sense of nationalism among the populace, who define themselves as Sunni, Shi’a, or Kurd rather than as Iraqis. You can’t get people to fight for something they don’t believe in, and Iraqis don’t believe in their country or their government. Out of self-preservation, they are left having to side with the strongest actor in their region until a stronger actor comes and takes his place. Right now, that actor is ISIS, a brutal group that maintains power solely through fear and intimidation.

That leads us to the question of what do we do now? We no longer have American forces in Iraq. Contrary to the lies of John McCain and other conservatives who want to pin the blame on Obama, it was al-Malaki’s decision for all of our troops to leave. He refused to sign a Standard of Forces Agreement that would have exempted the US military from Iraqi laws. Al-Maliki didn’t want the US military in the way of his plan to fully purge all Sunnis from the government and solidify his relationship with Iran. In the absence of a SOFA agreement, Obama had no choice but to pull all of our military out of the country. To leave them there, subject to the whims of the Iraqi “justice” system, would have been a serious breach of his responsibilities as Commander in Chief. Can you imagine the outrage if one of our soldiers had been charged, tried, convicted, and executed by the Iraqi government?

If al-Malaki signed a SOFA agreement now, we could have US forces back in Iraq in short order, but I don’t know if that is the right move. Obama has made the right statements about us not helping without serious changes in al-Malaki’s government, but I think all we would be doing is giving him the military force he needs to gain control once again, then when we leave he’ll be back to his same old tricks. Besides, we’ve learned from 10 years of war in Iraq that you can’t just install and prop up a government and hope the people will follow.

In the short term, we will probably continue to provide intelligence and we will likely engage in limited air strikes and close air support (assuming the Iraqis have any troops on the field to support), but I don’t think it will succeed. I believe that without drastic measures by the US, Iraq will eventually fall. It won’t happen overnight, because Iran will send their forces in to battle the Sunni insurgents, but it will happen. Our only hope then will be to contain the insurgents within the country’s borders. That’s the least worst option, but it just kicks the can down the road for someone else to deal with later, most likely with yet another invasion.

There may be a way to resolve Iraq once and for all, and that’s through occupation and pacification. It would be a long process and would come at great cost, but it may be the only thing that will work.

Obama should draft a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) for Iraq for Congress to vote on. The AUMF would lay out the required authorizations as well as the criteria for termination.

The requirements:

1. Activate the draft immediately for all military-age US citizens, male and female. Provide no exemptions for anything other than physical condition and conscientious objectors. Those exempted would be required to provide service for an identical period in organizations such as Peace Corps, Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, etc.
2. Declare Iraq a hostile state and authorize the use of all means necessary to eliminate the threat.
3. Provide the US State Department, with cooperation from the Department of Defense, the authority to create and implement a new system of government.
4. The AUMF will remain in force until Congress has determined that all objectives have been fully achieved.

The objectives:

1. An Iraqi government that is stable, fully functioning, and recognized as legitimate among the Iraqi people.
2. Elimination of all terrorist and insurgent groups within the Iraqi borders.
3. Elimination of the Iraqi populace placing ethnic identities over national identity.
4. Iraqi populace pride and belief in their government.

This is not a 10 or even 20 year process. It will take generations to change the mindset of the Iraqi people, but I don’t believe peace is possible without that happening. It will not take 100,000 or even 500,000 US troops. It will be on the order of 1,000,000+. For the first decade or two, our military would have to function as the police, the military, and the entire government. It will take that long to raise people who can fill those positions that have more loyalty to their country than to their ethnic group and who won’t turn tail and run the first time shots are fired at them. We would have to function as benevolent dictators, completely occupying and pacifying the country. We would have to go door-to-door and disarm the entire populace to reduce the threat to our troops.

I recognize that this is an extreme step with no guarantee of success, but the strategy we’ve been following for the past few decades is doomed to certain failure. This approach would not be popular on the left or on the right and I’m sure I’ll take some arrows for even suggesting it. This approach would never happen because the political risk is too great for the President and members of Congress, but if you honestly believe that what is happening in Iraq is vital to the national security of the US, you have to be willing to do what it takes to fix the problem and that’s what I think it will take.