Syria is the new Afghanistan.
Following the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in 1979, thousands of foreign volunteers, many of them Muslims from the Arab world, streamed into that country to join American and Saudi-backed fighters battling the Red army.
Three decades on, a similar phenomenon is unfolding in Syria as foreigners, mainly Muslims and Christian converts to Islam, travel there to fight for radical Islamic groups bent on overthrowing the secular nationalist regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
By some estimates, 7,000 to 11,000 foreigners are currently in Syria, which has been torn apart by a destructive civil war that has claimed the lives of 190,000 civilians and soldiers.
A good many of them have linked up with the Islamic State, an extremely violent Sunni organization which used to be known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Of late, Islamic State — which considers non-Sunni Muslims infidels and whose prime objective is the creation of a religious state in the Middle East — has been on a rampage, having conquered wide swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and beheaded the American freelance journalist James Foley.
U.S. government officials have expressed grave concern about Islamic State, an Al Qaeda breakaway group, claiming it’s the greatest threat to American interests since Al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on mainland United States on Sept. 11, 2001. In recognition of this reality, the United States has carried out limited air strikes against Islamic State formations in Iraq and promised to arm Kurdish fighters.
Washington is also concerned by the fact that about 100 American citizens have gone to Syria to fight in the war.
So far, three Americans have been killed — Nicole Lynn Mansfield, 33, of Flint, Michigan; Moner Mohammed Abusalha, 22, of Vero Beach, Florida, and Douglas McArthur McCain, 33, of Minneapolis, Minnesota
Abusalha, whose father was a Palestinian Arab, fought for the Islamic fundamentalist Nusra Front. Mansfield, a Baptist by birth and a Muslim after her conversion, was associated with an outfit called the Free Men of Syria.
McCain’s death, however, was of particular interest because he was the first American to die in Syria while fighting for Islamic State. An African American convert to Islam, he was a petty criminal before turning to Islam.
One hundred and thirty Canadians have found their way to Syria and other countries in the Middle East, says the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Michael Coulombe.
Among them was Andre Poulin, 24, of Timmins, Ontario, who was killed in 2013. Like many jihadis, he discovered radical Islam on the Internet and entered Syria through the porous Turkish border. Last week, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that two brothers who had recently converted to Islam, Gregory and Collin Gordon of Calgary, had joined the Islamic State.
By all accounts, upwards of 3,000 Europeans, including 500 Britons and 700 French, have joined anti-Assad forces in Syria. The masked Islamic State fighter who apparently decapitated Foley in Iraq appears to have been a British national, says Britain’s foreign secretary, Philip Hammond. British experts are still in the midst of trying to identify him.
Mehdi Nemmouche, the 29-year-old French Muslim who murdered three visitors at the Jewish Museum in Brussels on May 24, was allegedly a member of the Islamic State. According to police, Nemmouche, a dual citizen of France and Algeria, had a criminal record and was the first European citizen returning from Syria’s battlefields to commit a murder in Europe.
The Nemmouche file is eerily reminiscent of another criminal case which involved a French Muslim. In March 2012, Mohammed Merah, an Al Qaeda sympathizer who had received combat training in Pakistan and Afghanistan, killed three French army soldiers, as well as a rabbi and three Jewish children outside a Jewish day school in Toulouse.
According to Germany’s minister of interior, Thomas de Maziere, the Europeans most likely to be recruited by the jihadi movement are disaffected young men from Muslim immigrant backgrounds who have been unsuccessful in school and in life.
But according to a more recent report, Islamic State is looking not only for foot soldiers, but for professionals like doctors, engineers and oil field workers.
Cognizant of the dangers posed by European and North American jihadis, nine European Union interior ministers met recently in Milan to draw up a plan of action to identify young people who have signed up with Islamic organizations dedicated to toppling the Syrian regime.
It’s a problem of immense importance and should receive priority.