What could possess a married man in his thirties with a promising career to leave everything and fight in a war that wasn’t his? As Western men flock to Syria, intelligence agencies across Europe and the Arab world are asking similar questions.
As The National’s investigation highlighted yesterday, perhaps 10,000 foreign fighters arrive in Syria each year, many of them, like the case studies of 20-year old medical student Nasser Muthana or 28-year old maths tutor Mohammed Sebah, with decent careers. Drawn from diverse backgrounds and countries, they all appear to believe they are fighting for the sake of God, participants in a divine war.
For intelligence agencies, who have spent the years since September 11, 2001, seeking to shut down radical mosques and silence radical preachers, their paths towards radicalisation are worrying. Most appear to have been “self-radicalised”, first being exposed to and then seeking out online videos, audio recordings and writings. That presents a problem for intelligence services, both in the Middle East and abroad. It is impossible to shut down such information. The correct way is to combat it head-on: to seek out religious figures who can explain a correct, non-radical way of understanding faith and of understanding a time of great conflict.
There is also a further method, which recognises that young men going abroad to fight is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, the married man in his thirties mentioned earlier is not a modern-day jihadi: he was George Orwell, the celebrated author, who left Britain in the 1930s to go and fight in the Spanish civil war. Like many who did so from across Europe, he was motivated by noble aims and a feeling of belonging to something greater than himself.
That, indeed, is what motivates many young men, at an impressionable age when the world can seem staid and dull, and the thrill of war and brotherhood and noble causes can appear glamorous.
Many, historically and today, return jaded, having seen the brutality of war. Orwell was one such fighter: he saw first hand the lies, deprivation and cynicism of the Communists for whom he was fighting. Many of the young men in Syria today will see the warped mindset of militants – slaughtering men, women and children in cold blood – and ask themselves what they are fighting for.
Indeed, rather than criminalising these former fighters, governments should offer them the chance to tell their horrific experiences, so that others can hear what the poet Wilfred Owen – another young man in another great war, far from home – realised, that there is no “desperate glory” in brutal wars.