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ABSTRACT
The wars in Syria and Iraq attracted about 45,000 individuals from outside the arenas. Most joined the Islamic State, but interestingly, other prominent armed groups showed less interest in foreign volunteers. This paper introduces the Demand for Foreign Volunteers Theory (DFVT) to explain the diverging choices Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham, and the People’s Protection Units made. The theory links four variables that shape groups’ positions: political considerations, operational needs, organizational capacity, and ideational fit. Both operational and political considerations emphasize the motivation for using foreign volunteers, though the two are not equally important; when they conflict, political considerations take priority. Organizational capacity, on the other hand, determines a group’s ability to translate need into action, serving as a necessary—but insufficient—condition for foreign mobilization. Finally, ideational factors, specifically a group’s identity and ideology, determine the pool of potential recruits. The case studies show that political considerations made all three actors cautious about recruiting foreign fighters, though these considerations differed between groups. Ultimately, despite the availability of sufficient organizational capacity, all groups found it risky and even undesirable.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Kirstin Bakke, Idean Salehyan and the anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this article. Special thanks go to Rachel Miller, Jessica Blitz, and Aine Carolan for invaluable research assistance.
Notes
1. Instead of “foreign fighters” I prefer the term “foreign volunteers,” defined as individuals who: (1) leave their home countries to participate – directly or in supporting roles—in an armed conflict in a foreign location; (2) are not formally affiliated with an official state force; and (3) their deployment is not the result of outsourcing to a private security company. For the most common definitions of foreign fighters, see David Malet, Foreign Fighters: Transnational Identity in Civil Conflicts (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 9; Thomas Hegghammer, “The Rise of Muslim Foreign Fighters: Islam and the Globalization of Jihad,” International Security 35, no. 3 (2010/11): 58–9.
2. Thomas Hegghammer, “Syria’s Foreign Fighters,” Foreign Policy, December 9, 2013.
3. Mustafa Hamid and Leah Farrall, The Arabs at War in Afghanistan (London, UK: Hurst, 2015); Vahid Brown, Cracks in the Foundation: Leadership Schisms in al-Qa’ida from 1989–2006 (West Point, NY: Combating Terrorism Center, September 2007), 13–18; Vahid Brown, “Foreign Fighters in Historical Perspective: The Case of Afghanistan,” in Bombers, Bank Accounts, & Bleedout, edited by Brian Fishman (West Point, NY: Combating Terrorism Center, 2008), 27–30.
4. JN. Named Jabhat Fatah al-Sham—JFS—in August 2016, and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—HTS since January 2017.
5. For example, Brian Dodwell, Daniel Milton, and Don Rassler, The Caliphate’s Global Workforce: An Inside Look at the Islamic State’s Foreign Fighter Paper Trail (West Point, NY: Combating Terrorism Center, April 2016); Arie Perliger and Daniel Milton, From Cradle to Grave: The Lifecycle of Foreign Fighters in Iraq and Syria (West Point, NY: Combating Terrorism Center, November 2016); Barak Mendelsohn, “Why Do Jihadi Groups Recruit Foreign Fighters? The Case of the Islamic State,” Orbis 64, no. 1 (2020): 111–30.
6. Dodwell, Milton, and Rassler, The Caliphate’s Global Workforce. The danger that fighters upon their return would direct their weapons against their home countries is another source of scholarly interest, see Thomas Hegghammer, “Should I Stay Or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadist Choice between Domestic and Foreign Fighting” American Political Science Review 107, no. 1 (2013): 1–15; Daniel Byman and Jeremy Shapiro, Be Afraid. Be A Little Afraid: The Threat of Terrorism from Western Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2014); J.M. Berger, Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2011).
7. Jeni Mitchell, “The Contradictory Effects of Ideology on Jihadist War-Fighting: The Bosnia Precedent,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 31 (2008): 808–28; Kristin Bakke, “Help Wanted? The Mixed Record of Foreign Fighters in Domestic Insurgencies,” International Security 38, no. 4 (Spring 2014): 150–87.
8. Kristin Bakke, “Copying and Learning from Outsiders? Assessing Diffusion from Transnational Insurgents in the Chechen Wars,” in Transnational Dynamics of Civil War, edited by Jeffrey Checkel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 31–62; Hegghammer, “The Rise of Muslim Foreign Fighters”; Malet, Foreign Fighters.
9. Malet, Foreign fighters, 4.
10. For example see, Ed Payne, “More Americans Volunteering to Help ISIS,” CNN, March 5, 2015. https://www.cnn.com/2015/03/05/us/isis-us-arrests/index.html.
11. Hegghammer, “The Rise of Muslim Foreign Fighters”; Charles Lister, The Syrian Jihad: al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of Insurgency (London, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016), 31–48.
12. For example, compare Brian Dodwell, Daniel Milton, and Don Rassler, Then and Now: Comparing the Flow of Foreign Fighters to AQI and the Islamic State (West Point, NY: Combating Terrorism Center, December 2016); Richard Barrett, Beyond the Caliphate: Foreign Fighters and the Threat of Returnees (New York, NY: The Soufan Group, October 2017); Dodwell, Milton, and Rassler, The Caliphate’s Global Workforce.
13. Rania Abouzeid, “The Jihad Next Door,” Politico, June 23, 2014; “Al-Nusra Front Leader Speaks in Audio Interview on International Coalition, Recent Events in Syria,” SITE Intelligence Group, November 4, 2014.
14. Charles Lister, “Al-Qa’ida Reaps Rewards of U.S. Policy Failures on Syria,” Daily Beast, July 6, 2016.
15. Pieter Van Ostaeyen and Guy Van Vlierden, The Role of Belgian Fighters in the Jihadication of the Syrian War (Brussels, Belgium: European Foundation for Democracy, 2017), 11.
16. For example, Van Ostaeyen and Van Vlierden, The Role of Belgian Fighters.
17. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, “And Give Glad Tidings to the Believers,” SITE Intelligence Group, April 8, 2013.
18. For example, see “Alleged al-Nusra Front Foreign Fighter Gives Story of Travel to Syria,” SITE Intelligence Group, February 8, 2013; “Huge Amounts” Joining NF Amid Increasing Pressure From Enemy Forces,” February 15, 2016; “NF Fighters Urge Muslims to Syria With ‘#Time4Jihad’ Hashtag” March 3, 2016.
19. Lister, The Syrian Jihad, 65.
20. Harald Doornbos and Jenan Moussa, “The Greatest Divorce in the Jihadi World,” Foreign Policy, August 18, 2016. According to al-Julani, following the conflict with the Islamic State, foreigners accounted for only 40 percent of JN leaders and about 30 percent of its soldiers. “Al-Nusra Front Leader Speaks.”
21. Charles Lister, “Profiling Jabhat al-Nusra” (The Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World – Analysis Paper No. 24, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, July 2016), 14.
22. “Al-Nusra Front Leader Criticizes Terrorist Designation, Advises Fighters,” SITE Intelligence Group, December 28, 2012.
23. Al-Sahab, “The Reality Between the Pain and the Hope,” in Al-Qaeda 2.0: A Critical Reader, edited by Donald Holbrook (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), 99–134.
24. Lister, The Syrian Jihad, 124–26.
25. “Al-Jazeera: Full Translation of the First Part of the Interview with Abu Muhammad al-Julani,” Pietervanostaeyen Blog, June 1, 2015.
26. Lister, The Syrian Jihad, 124–26.
27. Yasir Abbas, “Another ‘State’ of Hate: Al-Nusra’s Quest to Establish an Islamic Emirate in the Levant,” in Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, edited by Hillel Fradkin, Husain Haqqani, and Eric Brown, vol. 20 (Washington, DC: Hudson Institute, 2016), 52–3.
28. Charles Lister, “The Nusra Front is Dead and Stronger Than Ever Before,” Foreign Policy, July 28, 2016.
29. Aymenn al-Tamimi, “The Formation of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and Wider Tensions in the Syrian Insurgency,” CTC Sentinel 10, no. 2 (February 2017): 16–20.
30. Caleb Weiss, “Uzbek Group Pledges Allegiance to al Nusra Front,” Long War Journal, September 30, 2015; “Central Asian Fighters in Syria Join al-Nusra Front,” Middle East Eye, September 23, 2015, middleeasteye.net/news/central-asian-fighters-syria-join-al-nusra-front-259685836.
31. Caleb Weiss, “Foreign Fighter Group Pledges Allegiance to al Nusra Front,” June 13, 2016, longwarjournal.org/archives/2016/06/foreign-fighter-group-pledges-allegiance-to-al-nusrah-front.phphttp://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2016/06/foreign-fighter-group-pledges-allegiance-to-al-nusrah-front.php.
32. For example, prior to the rise of ISIS many of the Belgian foreign volunteers trained at Majlis Shura al-Mujahideen. See Van Ostaeyen and Van Vlierden, The Role of Belgian Fighters.
33. Lister, Profiling Jabhat al-Nusra, 33.
34. See Barak Mendelsohn, The al-Qaeda Franchise: The Expansion of al-Qaeda and its Consequences (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016); Mendelsohn, Jihadism Constrained: The Limits of Transnational Jihadism and What it Means for Counterterrorism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
35. “Al-Nusra Front Leader Speaks.”
36. Chris Zambelis, “Ahrar al-Sham: A Profile of Northern Syria’s al-Qaeda Surrogate,” Terrorism Monitor 11, no. 7 (April 2013): 4–5.
37. “Charter of the Syrian Islamic Front,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, carnegieendowment.org/syriaincrisis/50831 (accessed October 25, 2017); “New Addition to the Syrian Islamic Front,” Jadaliyya, jadaliyya.com/pages/index/11578/new-addition-to-the-syrian-islamic-front (accessed October 25, 2017); Aron Lund, “Syria’s Salafi Insurgents: The Rise of the Syrian Islamic Front” (UI Papers, no. 17, March 2013).
38. Seth Jones et al., The Evolution of the Salafi-Jihadist Threat: Current and future Challenges from the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and Other Groups (Washington, DC: CSIS, November 2018), 24.
39. “Ahrar al-Sham,” Mapping Militant Organizations, http://web.stanford.edu/group/mappingmilitants/cgi-bin/groups/view/523 (accessed October 25, 2017).
40. Suleiman Al-Khalidi, “Arab Islamist Fighters Eager to Join Syria Rebels,” Reuters, July 31, 2012; Miriam Karouny, “Islamist Rebel Brigades Join Forces Against Assad,” Reuters, October 11, 2012.
41. Richard Barrett, Foreign Fighters in Syria (New York, NY: The Soufan Group, June 2014).
42. “Ahrar al-Sham,” Mapping Militant Organizations; “Charter of the Syrian Islamic Front; “New Addition to the Syrian Islamic Front,” Jadaliyya, jadaliyya.com/pages/index/11578/new-addition-to-the-syrian-islamic-front (accessed October 25, 2017); Lund, “Syria’s Salafi Insurgents.”
43. Constanze Letsch, “Foreign Jihadis Change Face of Syrian Civil War; Fighters from Overseas Are an Increasingly Dominant- and Sometimes Resented- Force in the Fight Against Bashar al-Assad,” The Guardian, December 25, 2015.
44. “Ahrar al-Sham,” Mapping Militant Organizations.
45. Labib al-Nahhas, “The deadly consequences of mislabeling Syria’s revolutionaries,” The Washington Post, July 10, 2015; Labib al-Nahhas, “I’m a Syrian and I Fight ISIL Every Day. It Will Take More Than Bombs From the West to Defeat this Menace” The Telegraph, July 21, 2015; Charles Lister, “The Dawn of Mass Jihad: Success in Syria Fuels al-Qa’ida’s Evolution,” CTC Sentinel 9, no. 9 (September 2016): 13–20.
46. Haid Haid, “Why Ahrar al-Sham Couldn’t Stand Up to HTS’s Attack in Idlib,” Chatham House, August 2017, https://syria.chathamhouse.org/research/why-ahrar-al-sham-couldnt-stand-up-to-htss-attack-in-idlib.
47. “Ahrar al-Sham,” Mapping Militant Organizations.
48. “Ahrar al-Sham Video Shows Training Camp, Calls For Mobilization,” SITE Intelligence Group, January 17, 2016; “Ahrar al-Sham Video Incites Youth to Join Jihad in Syria,” SITE Intelligence Group, May 4, 2016.
49. Shirin Jaafari, “For some Americans, the Conflict in Syria is ‘the Spanish Civil War of our time,’” PRI, September 13, 2017, www.pri.org/stories/2017-09-13/some-americans-conflict-syria-spanish-civil-war-our-time (accessed September 20, 2019).
50. “Kurdish People’s Protection Unit, YPG,” Global Security, www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/ypg.htm (accessed February 9, 2016).
51. Chase Winter, “More than 200 People from Germany Fighting with Kurdish Forces Against IS,” Deutsche Welle, April 10, 2017.
52. Shashi Jayakumar, “Transnational Volunteers Against ISIS” (ICPR, 2019), 10–14. https://icsr.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/ICSR-Report-Transnational-Volunteers-Against-ISIS.pdf.
53. Josie Ensor, “Turkey Warns: We Will Treat Britons Fighting with Kurds as Terrorists,” The Telegraph, September 1, 2016; Jayakumar, Transnational Volunteers Against ISIS.
54. “Turkish Intelligence: 4,500 Kurds from Turkey Fighting with YPG in Syria,” Rudaw, January 7, 2015.
55. Mat Wolf, “Americans ‘Fighting ISIS’ Are Just Props,” The Daily Beast, March 13, 2015.
56. “Kurds Outraged as Turkey Closes Border to Volunteers for Kobane Fight,” Rudaw, September 30, 2014, www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/turkey/30092014.
57. Jenna Krajeski, “What Kobani Means for Turkey’s Kurds,” The New Yorker, November 8, 2014, www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/kobani-means-turkeys-kurds.
58. Jennifer Percy, “Meet the American Vigilantes Who Are Fighting ISIS,” New York Times, September 30, 2016.
59. Wolf, “Americans ‘Fighting ISIS’ Are Just Props.”
60. For example, Australia criminalized foreign fighting that is not under the auspices of a state. See Jayakumar, Transnational Volunteers Against ISIS, 37.
61. Henry Tuck, “'Arrested, Jailed, Bailed’ – Why It Should Be Illegal to Fight Against ISIS,” Institute for Strategic Dialogue, August 11, 2016, www.strategicdialogue.org/arrested-jailed-bailed-why-it-should-be-illegal-to-fight-against-isis.
62. John Knefel, “A Hello to Arms: A New Generation of Steely-Gazed Anarcho-Communists Head Off to Syria,” The Village Voice, June 7, 2016.
63. Evan Dyer, “Foreigners Who Sign Up to Fight ISIS Now Face Wrath of Turkish Army,” CBC News, January 05, 2017, www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-turkey-kurds-1.3923287.
64. Dion Nissenbaum, “The American Veterans Who Fight ISIS,” Wall Street Journal, September 4, 2015.
65. “YPG International,” ypg-international.org/support-ypg-in-rojava (accessed February 13, 2017).
66. Wes Enzinna, “A Dream of Secular Utopia in ISIS’ Backyard,” New York Times, November 24, 2015. For Bookchin’s writing, see The Anarchist Library. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/murray-bookchin.
67. For example, see Knefel, “A Hello to Arms.”
68. “YPG International.” ypg-international.org/support-ypg-in-rojava (accessed February 13, 2017).
69. Roy Gutman, “Have the Syrian Kurds Committed War Crimes?” The Nation, February 7, 2017; From the group’s website: “YPG was set up to protect the legacy and values of the people of Rojava and is founded on the principles of the paradigm of democratic society, ecology and woman’s liberation. Without preferring or discriminating any religion, language, nation, gender or political parties, YPG is protecting the country against all attacks from outside … Persons from all different nations, religions and spiritual groups of Rojava can join the YPG. Arabs, Assyrians, Turkmens, Armenians, Kurds and many other in Rojava-Northern Syria living minorities are working united in YPG,” See People’s Defense Units (YPG). www.ypgrojava.org/About-Us (accessed February 10, 2017).
70. Jayakumar counts about seventy-five (15 percent of his database). See Jayakumar, Transnational Volunteers Against ISIS, 11.
71. At the peak of its power, IS controlled seven border crossings between Turkey and Syria. Dodwell, Milton, and Rassler, Then and Now, 14.
72. Smugglers reported that during the first two years of the Syrian civil war there was virtually no border between Turkey and Syria. See Letsch, “Foreign Jihadis Change Face of Syrian Civil War.”
73. Humeyra Pamuk, “Walls and Watchtowers Rise as Turkey Tries to Seal Border Against Islamic State,” Reuters, February 3, 2016; Tim Arango and Eric Schmitt, “A Path to ISIS, Through a Porous Turkish Border,” New York Times, March 9, 2015.
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Barak Mendelsohn
Barak Mendelsohn is an associate professor of political science at Haverford College. He is the author of Jihadism Constrained: The Limits of Transnational Jihadism and What It Means for Counterterrorism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019) and The al-Qaeda Franchise: The Expansion of al-Qaeda and Its Consequences (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016).