[LINK] "The New International Brigades"

[rfmcdonald]

Marco d'Eramo's blog post at the London Review of Books looks at the dispiriting subject of the volunteers travelling around the world to fight for the Islamic State. These people, it seems, are not especially disenfranchised. They're doing it because they want to do it.

No one really dwells on the question of why so many young men from Europe, Canada, Australia, even China, are going to fight in Syria and Iraq with the so-called Islamic State (Isis), or with other Islamist militias. The New York Times recently published a map showing which countries the foreign volunteers come from. The numbers are slippery and often contradictory, but the foreign presence in Syria and Iraq is reckoned at around 17,000 fighters. The biggest contingents are from Chechnya and the North Caucasus (around 9000) and Turkey (1000). There are also 400 from Kosovo. But 1900 come from Western Europe (700 from France, 340 from Britain, 60 from Ireland), 100 from the US, and between 50 and 100 from Australia.

The prevailing view is that these volunteers are marginalised fanatics: in other words, they’re ‘crazy’. Madness has been used to explain everyone from Caligula to Hitler, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein and any other leader or dictator who has been either defeated or marked for defeat. But it is an explanation that explains nothing, and which rather indicates that we are incapable of explaining the phenomenon. We need to be extremely careful with the way we define other people: no one defines himself as a ‘terrorist’ (just as no one defines himself as a ‘populist’). During the Second World War, the Germans called the maquisards ‘terrorists’, but after the Allied victory no one called them that any more. The French called the FLN in Algeria ‘terrorists’, but after independence no one used the term, simply because the FLN had won. No one called Begin or Ho Chi Min a ‘terrorist’, because they too imposed a victor’s narrative.

The conclusions drawn in An Economic Analysis of the Financial Records of al-Qaida in Iraq, prepared by the Rand Corporation in 2010, apply to Isis too, the institute says. First, financial gain is not the principal motive driving people to join Islamist militias: a fighter earns a lot less than the regional average, while his chances of dying are a lot higher. Second, the terrorists have higher than expected levels of education and wealth, ‘which weakens theories explaining individual participation in militancy as being due to financial deprivation, mental instability or poor education’: the volunteers, according to the Rand Corporation, are not marginalised, crazy or poor.

The new international brigades are a phenomenon that needs to be taken seriously, and raises a serious question. The first modern ‘foreign volunteers’ were those who in the early 1800s went to fight and die for the independence of Christian Greece from the Islamic Ottoman Empire, including Santorre di Santarosa (who died on Sphacteria in 1825) and Byron (who died at Missolonghi in 1824). Garibaldi was known as the ‘hero of two worlds’ because he fought in Brasil, Uruguay, Italy and France (in 1870-71, against the Prussians). They all embodied the words of Emile Barrault, a follower of Saint-Simon who told Garibaldi in 1833 that ‘a man who, making himself cosmopolitan, adopts humanity as his fatherland and offers his sword and his blood to all peoples who struggle against tyranny, is more than a soldier; he is a hero.’