My second Wikipedia entry written from scratch. I had an unexpected appointment cancellation yesterday so spent the morning writing this instead. I’m autistic and have a special interest in ISIS, and plan to write entries for other foreign members.
My second Wikipedia entry written from scratch. I had an unexpected appointment cancellation yesterday so spent the morning writing this instead. I’m autistic and have a special interest in ISIS, and plan to write entries for other foreign members.
Well done! There's so much value in Wiki pages for small names that could easily be lost in history.
I think my next one will be Zahra and Salma Halane, the 16-year-old twin sisters who joined. Their older brother Ahmed was a jihadist too and fought with Al Shabaab in Somalia and with ISIS in Syria and somehow survived, returned to Europe and lives an apparently law abiding life as a Quran teacher. But his sisters are still stuck in the Middle East unable to return home, because the UK won’t take them back.
Like most cults, ISIS spread like a virus through families and friend groups. One person would join then they’d start trying to convince their family and friends from back home to join. Shamima Begum, perhaps the most famous ISIS member from Britain, joined together with two friends, following a third friend who’d gone to Syria before them.
[EDITED TO ADD] Ok, entry about the Halane siblings is up!
I’m shocked by the fact that the brother is apparently living back in Europe with no consequences for definitely traveling abroad to kill people. Pathetic.
Denmark tries to rehabilitate their jihadists. Or it was trying in 2014 anyway. Not sure about now.
Very sad, convincing their family to go die for religious fascism. Glad the caliphate collapsed but unfortunately there's still remnants. Definitely an interesting topic to read about though. I often reread info about the holocaust myself, its so awful but so hard to look away
As far as I know the Halane sisters are still detained in Syria.
Al Shabaab and then Isis? Aren’t they opposed to each other?
Hum are you suggesting that we should just erase his name and pretend like ISIS never happened?
Identifying the perpetrators seems like a key part to tell the world what really happened there. I’m pretty sur the victims of this terrorist organization would not be so keen to just forget
I don’t think that’s what the person meant at all; they were saying we should remember and recognize those minor figures.
"Jaman was born in Portsmouth, England of first-generation Bangladeshi immigrant parents"
More than that, I worked next to him for a year. We used to have good chats. He was devout but always friendly. Then one day he stopped coming in to the office. About 6 months later he was on newsnight, then shortly after that he was dead.
It was strange, still is, that the lad I knew bore little in common with the guy who went and got himself killed for nothing.
It must’ve been quite a shock to find out your nice former coworker had joined a terrorist group.
Yeah, pretty much. I know it sounds daft but it still feels weird.
it is weird, he decided to go join ISIS in the wreckage of Iraq, who got their claws into him and told him that was a good idea idk.
But unlike Shamima, she wasnt the first, it was an older girl from the first school, who groomer her idk, but she crossed the border because of Candian Intelligence...
Supposedly the Aussies left the place he was radicalised open because it was a good source of "intel" clearly not good enough...
He joined ISIS in Syria not Iraq.
same thing? or is there a difference?
geez keep downvoting for asking a question now answered folks...
You could say ISIS in Syria was kind of fighting a bit more a just war at first but what they eventually did was fucking horrible an disgusting and there isnt a level of hell deep enough for most them.
It really depends on how you view the Assad regime I guess. ISIS looks at Assad like they look at me, i'm Druze, a headchopping candidate of the highest order lol
Jaman was killed before the Yazidi enslavement began and before ISIS even announced the formation of their caliphate. ISIS had a lower profile in those days and Jaman claimed he’d never heard of it before his arrival in Syria.
I’ve been down an ISIS rabbit hole for a year and a half. I know a lot of people joined ISIS in the early days of the Syrian civil war because it was one of many armed groups fighting against Assad’s regime. It’s hard to say who was worse, Assad or what ISIS turned out to be.
Exactly and thats why I prefaced my response by you could say at first they werent THAT bad. Im Lebanese so I was a few miles away watching it all play out in real time.
Im a Non Muslim Lebanese... so im biased. For me Assad in power is less scary than Sharaa. We all see HTS and Al Nusra as headchoppers. They were kidnapping Lebanese soldiers and cutting off their heads. They were blowing up Shiaa neighborhoods. With their ISIS allies. So for me personally Assad will always be the lesser evil. I can see how that opinion would vary based on religious affiliation though
In terms of pure numbers and scale of suffering? Easily Assad. But it can be argued that it was only because the ISIS never got it's hands on chemical weapons and missiles.
There was a difference at the time. The ISIS caliphate eventually took parts of Iraq (namely the city of Mosul) but not till well after Jaman’s death. And he traveled with a Syria-specific purpose in mind, to join the Nusra Front which was battling pro-Assad forces in the Syrian civil war. Only after being rejected from the Nusra Front for failing the background check (they needed a local jihadist to vouch for him and he knew no one in Syria) did Jaman start looking for another jihadist group to join. He chose ISIS.
more they found him though from the way you wrote it, but yeah its good wording too, as i had assumed you were writing about jihadists, but ur not and he's not a classic nutjob case as people would first assume
I want to write a series of Wikipedia entries about Westerners who traveled to Syria to join the ISIS caliphate. (Jaman was killed before it was declared.) I don’t have any sympathy for them (except the kids, some sympathy for groomed minors, the youngest was only 13 years old) but they fascinate me.
At first I had no idea why anyone, particularly a woman, would want to sign up for this. But I read more and more about the lives of the Western people who joined. I learned about ISIS recruiting tactics and their propaganda. I learned about the general geopolitical situation at the time. And things started to make more sense. I feel I can now understand why so many people did this. I still don’t sympathize with them because there is no excuse for joining a globally reviled terrorist organization, but it no longer baffles me why this happened.
in Iraq they were just trying to overthrow the government and establish a caliphate.
in syria it was a lot more complex. their ultimate goal was more or less the same as Iraq but they got muddled in with the Syrian civil war instead of simply doing their own religious insurgent thing. they sometimes collaborated with non-terrorist groups against the government(I guess the definition of terrorist is debatable here), sometimes even happened to be on the same side as some foreign governments. splintered off into different groups with very different trajectories. lots of them were offed by the coalition, a very special one now controls syria as it's legitimate ruling government with the full thumbs up of the international community. so yeah, big mess.
Hey look, I'm not gonna sit here and try to work out what made him do what he did, and to be honest I'm struggling to parse what you've typed anyway. I'm just saying, he was more than just a misguided terrorist fighting for islamo-nazis.
“Islamo-Nazis” is a good description for ISIS’s behavior, though ironically they said they were anti-racist and it didn’t matter what color you were as long as you were their kind of Muslim.
Well it looks like he had bad luck. If he would have been let in Al Nusra which is an Al Qaeda rebrand and had he survived they would eventually become HTS and win the war. Ahmed Al Sharaa now runs Syria... dude was once just an Al Nusra fighter.
yeah for sure, he could also have been MI6/CIA/IDK MOSSAD, so i can see why they didnt take him on that account.
a simple no turning into a yes could have changed his life, i dont know much other then them being some form of Al Qaeda so idk what they got up to in the war
Just the usual killing of civilians, torture, an implement of harsh Sharia law where they had power.... thats the baseline of what groups were doing there on both sides
And there are many more in the UK that secretly share these beliefs
”be afraid of your neighbors!! Don’t trust anyone!”
Twice I had friends tell me that they wish their life was more meaningful and harder, that they would not mind dying in a glorious war rather than through old age. I think it might be the same mindset that makes people leave their comfortable lives to join far away terrorist groups.
Never found any quotes from the parents so don’t know if they agree with their sons’ views but I doubt they’re happy that one son was killed in Syria and two others wound up in prison.
A lot of young people I read about who joined, their parents went to great lengths to try to save them. Many traveled to the Syrian border to look for them and try to convince them to return home. One guy left his home in Norway and even went into ISIS territory itself and tried to persuade an ISIS court to return his teenage daughters to him. When that did not work he hired a mercenary to kidnap the girls. Unfortunately that didn’t work either.
Wow, tragic. Is there a place to read about the Norwegian story?
It’s told in detail in Åsne Seierstad’s book, Two Sisters: A Father, His Daughters, and Their Journey into the Syrian Jihad. And I wrote a Wikipedia entry for the girls; it was my first entry written from scratch.
I will also add that the main reason the Norwegian father’s rescue attempts failed is his daughters were very happy in the caliphate and did not want to leave. The ISIS judge asked if they wanted to go back to Norway and they said no. They did not give a single solitary fuck about the suffering of their father, who was imprisoned and tortured by ISIS, or of the rest of their family’s suffering. They are back in Norway now, serving time in prison for joining ISIS, having taken no accountability.
Yeah a lot of people seem to miss this but basically every interview I’ve seen with surviving ISIS members has them expressing absolutely no remorse whatsoever.
They are worse than Nazis.
Some of them have expressed remorse. But to publicly denounce ISIS while living in a camp surrounded by ISIS supporters isn’t very safe.
Shamima Begum has, but it's unclear whether that's just because she's stateless and wants her British passport back.
Eh. I watched her initial interviews and she didn’t sound sympathetic at all.
Then she did a second interview circuit with a generic full apology. Likely coached by her lawyer.
It’s hard to tell because she’s clearly not very intelligent but I genuinely don’t think she actually feels any remorse I think she’s just going through the motions.
She has said she only made the initial statements she did because the refugee camp she was in, Al-Hawl, is very unsafe and full of ISIS supporting women who were violent towards non-ISIS people. Her statements about ISIS have changed since she was moved to Al-Roj, a smaller, safer camp.
Have you seen the television show Caliphate? I would love to hear your thoughts on it and the portrayal of the young women main characters.
I have seen it and thought it was okay, and the way they were manipulated and became radicalized was realistic.
geez, how old were his kids?
They were only 16 and 19 when they left Norway.
wonder who groomed them, but police response was probably similar to Rotheram girls, "white trash" cba who cares? tbh idk how there werent stricter security about unaccompanied girls/kids flying to Turkey...
Asne Seierstad wrote a book about them. They were might have radicalized by their Quran teacher (ironically hired by their parents, who are moderate Muslims and were absolutely destroyed when their daughters joined a terrorist group), or possibly by a local Salafi Muslim group they joined.
As someone who’s worked with “moderate” Muslim refugees in western countries, I think 9 times out of ten it’s the parents’ fault.
They come to a western country and cling to their country’s traditions. So their girls are not allowed to consort with boys, are not allowed to work part time jobs like other high school students, they have extremely strict rules about what activities they can pursue.
The kids, who are already undergoing a difficult social transition, end up ostracized/ignored by their peers. And where does this lead? To seeking belonging somewhere else, often ending up in extremism.
I don’t think it was the parents’ fault in this Norwegian case. They wanted their daughters to have educations and careers, and their daughters were allowed to participate in all the school activities and had non-Muslim friends growing up. Their parents were confused and alarmed when the girls suddenly became religious fanatics covering every inch of their bodies, then devastated when they disappeared.
With Ifthekar Jaman’s family though it might have been different. His parents, per the sources I’ve read sent him to an Islamic boarding school when he was a kid. His two brothers supported his actions, giving media statements praising him when he joined ISIS and then again after he was killed. Later on both brothers went to prison for helping others join ISIS. To have all their sons be ISIS supporters suggests the parents didn’t do enough to make sure the kids assimilated.
This.
lol, gender segregation leads to extremism what a jump
i mean what does "salafi" actually mean here though. Ah Anwar Al-Awlaki, ah his name pops up as a dude who went off the rails in late 2000s, was drone striked while fighting, with his yemeni tribe and Saudi's, agaisnt the Houthis by the US. Then later killed his 8 year old daughter too.
Never heard his later stuff tbf, so havent ever heard had it in context past SALAFI "scare" tactics.
anyway back to this kid.
"His family back in England stated he had become concerned about the plight of Syrian civilians and they believed he had gone there to help."
I mean it doesnt sound untrue, the fact he tried to join a few groups and hadnt even heard of ISIS. The first group, don't they know run Syria??
"At a coffee shop he met an Algerian member of ISIL, which Jaman said he had previously never heard of, and he ultimately joined ISIL."
ok, so this a different sort of person to the Aussie nutters. Its also why even from "The Sun" polling 25% of brits had sympathy for them.
Would be the equivalent today to go join the IDF while we have footage of them blowing up kids, sniping kids, medics, women, old men. Mass rape in prison, protecting settlers who brutalise everything from trees, lamb, goats and people...
They think they have gone to "help", not everyone going was a nutter, but you gotta seriously ask why they went...
This was the group the Norwegian girls joined.
I have posted on this sub about the deaths of Al-Awlaki’s children.
I have read a lot about ISIS over the past year and a half. I agree that there were probably people in ISIS who traveled to war-torn Syria under the impression that they could do something to help the situation, then one thing led to another and they wound up becoming terrorists instead of helping anyone.
The Nusra Front merged with some other jihadist groups who became Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), who eventually kicked Assad out. Al Sharaa had been a Nusra Front and HTS fighter.
SOOOO many nutters, thanks for the link. feel bad for the dad.
Your view of the IDF is biased. And it’s mandatory.
I'd be interested how to see how the UK being largely south and south east Asian Muslim population means for radicalisation compared to somewhere like France with a more north African Muslim population.
I mention all the above in the context of the most radical,fundamental Muslims, not all.
I know a little about the Francophone jihadists, not as much as about the English-speaking ones. Omar Omsen and Malika El-Aroud were major Francophone influences with their social media (Omar) and writing (Malika).
Omar founded Firqat al-Ghuraba, a militant group consisting mainly of foreign fighters. He claims to be “retired” now that Assad is gone. But I think Al-Sharaa would very much like Omar to go home. Omar has got a price on his head as an international terrorist. Syrian government forces attacked his camp in October.
It's always the second gen.
Too Western for back home, to much of a foreigner for the Westerners - fertile breeding ground for extremism.
My ex is Lithuanian and even though he was born there, he moved here young. He talks a lot about feeling disconnected and not feeling like he belongs anywhere. Hes not a religious fascist though, he's an anarchist like me
It's also very specifically the version of Islam that seems to be popular in the UK. A lot of UK Muslims (obvs not all) cling to very conservative traditions like first cousin marriage, and are conservative even compared to the majority of Muslims back in Pakistan.
Isn’t the UK making cousin marriage legal now cuz it’s “racist” to be against it?
I think you're getting some distorted news lol. Cousin marriage has been legal in the UK since basically forever. There was a proposal to ban it like 2 years ago, and one extremely stupid MP named Iqbal Mohamed argued against the ban. I'm sure there are some dipshits on the internet who think it's racist to talk about it (I've had them yell at me on this subreddit lmao) but I don't think they represent a significant population.
You never really know how many people around you at school or work, who seem perfectly normal, might be susceptible and could snap if similar circumstances were to occur again.
Colour me shocked.
More British Muslims joined ISIS than the British armed forces.
Is there a reputable source for this?
Yes - Hansard shows a number of answers by ministers that give the number of people who travelled to engage with the conflict in Syria and Iraq as approximately 900 between 2013 and 2019. The MoD state that there is approximately 450 Muslims currently serving in the Regular Army.
https://jobs.army.mod.uk/regular-army/inclusion-values/religion/
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2019-03-18/debates/42259394-C90B-4670-BFC9-A5F91518A5FF/ISISMembersReturningToTheUK#:~:text=The%20Home%20Secretary%20recently%20stated,deprived%20of%20their%20British%20citizenship.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/11/britons-joining-isis-grown-to-850-100-killed-syria-khadiza-sultana#:~:text=In%20January%20the%20government%20put,remain%20in%20Syria%20and%20Iraq.&text=Many%20of%20the%20foreign%20recruits,placed%20on%20a%20watch%20list.
Fascinating, thank you!
Isn't it a bit disingenuous to compare numbers over à period of time to a number at a point in time?
Yes, I would agree - but the numbers of British Muslims joining our Armed Forces and undergoing training annually is statistically insignificant. See table 2 in this document - 30 British born Muslims were trained across our entire Armed Forces in the years 2016, 2017 and 2018.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5ec66e9ed3bf7f4606f1e09a/FOI2019-13195-British_Born_Muslims_in_the_Armed_Forces-_Redacted2.pdf
Not really, I highly doubt those that attempted to join, but failed training, later went on to join ISIS.
How many do you think could have "failed" their ISIS training? (Ie, able to quit)
If we want to consider “intent”, then why don’t we include the fact that polling of British Muslims showed that 1 in 5 had sympathy for those travelling to Syria and Iraq to engage in the conflict. I appreciate that these statistics are inconvenient, but that is unfortunate.
That's fine, but you have to include the equivalent figures for "sympathy for Muslims joining the British Armed Forces".
We don't have real data until there's equivalent data to properly compare.
I think you could still lightly deduct a "1/3 of Muslims that planned to take up arms, planned to take up arms for ISIS".
That's about the best you can get from this and that's pretty bad in fairness. But then is it a problem? We'd then have to compare the overall amount of Muslims with the amount of Muslims that are willing to take up arms and fight for anyone.
Such is the depressing nature of people throwing around statistics without context in order to entice a particular reaction.
Okay - 78% of British Muslims opposed Taliban attacks on British Army soldier in 2009 polling by the Muslim Council of Britain. This sounds good until you realise it means that 22%, nearly a quarter, supported the Taliban killing British soldiers. You would be hard pressed to find any other immigrant British demographic in which 1 in 4 support the killing of soldiers.
https://mcb.org.uk/mcb-report-demonstrates-long-standing-british-muslim-support-for-armed-forces/
Where are the "no opinion" or "don't know"s?
Yes, on face value in the way you presented it, it does sound bad. Until you realise you're misreprenting your own source and neglecting that 22% not agreeing with the first statement does not equate to agreeing with the exact opposite.
Let me be clear: I support neither outcome. I am merely pointing out the conclusion does not represent the statistics used.
Edit: lol at downvotes for pointing out the inability to draw conclusions from this data. I feel sorry for those offended that this does not say "25% of Muslims hate all of us".
lmao, 1/4 brits had sympathy for them too (same poll), what can you lightly deduct there too?
Exactly my point. Add one more statistic and the whole thing looks different, implying different conclusions.
Is it 1/3 of Muslims, or is it 1/4 of all people, with slightly more sympathy from Muslims? We don't know, because there isn't enough data to draw the conclusions that have been drawn.
If we try to draw the same conclusion as the other commenter, it would imply that 1/4 of Brits support terrorism. Which is absurd.
Ifthekar Jaman tried to join the Nusra Front but failed, because he needed a local jihadist to vouch for him and he didn’t know anyone. Joined ISIS instead.
The entry for him mentions he convinced five men to travel to Syria to join ISIS as a group. One noped out during training and went back home to England (and to prison). The others were killed in ISIS’s service.
That doesn't add anything other than "1 was able to leave".
It is entirely disingenuous. Here's an example of quite how disingenuous:
Unfortunately reddit is destroying the link.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5ec66e9ed3bf7f4606f1e09a/FOI2019-13195-_British_Born_Muslims_in_the_Armed_Forces-_Redacted__2_.pdf
Link doesnt work.
It's worse than I thought.
Armed forces numbers are over a period of time, they don't all join at once, they then serve for many years.
And they don't all serve for the same period of time. Do you think the numbers in Isis in 2009 would be the cumulative amount after the above 6-year period?
They serve for 4 years minimum, and the amount of muslims leaving immediately after the 4 year minimum term was below 5% in 2016, 2017 and 2018. The argument was it isn't fair to compare cumulative ISIS numbers to at the time army numbers, but the army numbers were also cumulative and not drastically changing numerically on a year by year basis. The numbers active in ISIS in 2019 wasn't the discussion, the discussion was about how many had joined up to the point of X year. 2019 might be 900 joined with 800 of them being dead, doesn't change anything if less than 900 British muslims cycled through the armed forces in that time. However ISIS began caving to international pressure after 2015 hence why the original claim when it was made in late 2015 referred to prior that point.
People really suck when it comes to statistics. This is why they're weaponised so frequently. Deep-dives are boring and tedious, with heaps of nuance. Surface-level soundbites from semi-concluded research are much easier to follow, no matter how foolish that may be.
I think “people who traveled to engage with the conflict in Syria and Iraq” is not the same as “people who joined ISIS.” There were a lot of militias in Syria at the time, some jihadist, some not, and ISIS was just one such group. The Nusra Front was popular too and Jaman had traveled to Syria with the intention to join that group but was rejected.
The Nusra front wikipedia lists their massacres too.
I have heard that but don’t know if it’s true. It is pretty hard to determine exactly how many British people joined ISIS and I don’t know if even the national security people know the exact number. It’s not like ISIS kept a list of all of them, or if they did it hasn’t been found. Most of them adopted new names upon arrival in Syria. And few of them lasted very long.
I’ve also seen books with titles claiming the book’s subject joined ISIS but when I’ve read the book, no, they actually joined another Syrian jihadist group such as the Nusra Front. The name ISIS sells more book copies though.
This is incorrect. You're misquoting the following statement by the New York Times:
"More British Muslims have joined Islamist militant groups than serve in the country’s armed forces." and this was during 2015, when Islamic terrorist groups were at the height of their memberships.
The fact some joined Al-Nusra instead of ISIS who also carried out massacres carries little weight here.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/reality-check/2015/dec/11/donald-trump-needs-check-facts-british-muslims-isis
The only argument presented is 'don't compare the cumulative numbers to ISIS against the numbers currently in the army because that isn't fair'. This point completely ignores how active members in the army is also cumulative, people don't serve for 1 year.
This is not incorrect - see my comment above.
Yes - Hansard shows a number of answers by ministers that give the number of people who travelled to engage with the conflict in Syria and Iraq as approximately 900 between 2013 and 2019. The MoD state that there is approximately 450 Muslims currently serving in the Regular Army.
https://jobs.army.mod.uk/regular-army/inclusion-values/religion/
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2019-03-18/debates/42259394-C90B-4670-BFC9-A5F91518A5FF/ISISMembersReturningToTheUK#:~:text=The%20Home%20Secretary%20recently%20stated,deprived%20of%20their%20British%20citizenship.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/11/britons-joining-isis-grown-to-850-100-killed-syria-khadiza-sultana#:~:text=In%20January%20the%20government%20put,remain%20in%20Syria%20and%20Iraq.&text=Many%20of%20the%20foreign%20recruits,placed%20on%20a%20watch%20list.
I concede the point. However I find it misleading nonetheless.
On the one side, we're counting all military activity of Islamist militant groups, but only the Regular Army of the UK? In terms of personnel, the Regular Army composes 40-50% of personnel depending on definitions. So the number would be roughly equal.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/reality-check/2015/dec/11/donald-trump-needs-check-facts-british-muslims-isis
Accounting for Navy and RAF too, more headed to Syria to join ISIS and or Al-nusra
Since which date? I can’t believe this (or maybe I’m in denial who knows)
i mean British army gotta step up the propaganda then post Iraq War...
all that means is ISIS had better propaganda lol
ISIS unfortunately did produce very high quality propaganda. I’ve read some academic papers on the subject.
This is a crazy cultral observation and kind of terrifying...
Why would they join to kill their fellow Muslims?
Because they appreciate their British identity, the modern world, and they want to protect reasonable values like tolerance and freedom.
Congrats on your second creation! This was a rabbit hole I got to read about as it was happening 10 years ago.
Rest in piss.
Totally unrelated, but can I just say that it's insane that ISIS first became a headline-grabbing event when I was in university (nearly 13 years ago)? Man, I'm so fucking old lol.
I have kids twice that age
Unfortunately there are children born in the ISIS caliphate who have been living in detention camps with their mothers since 2019 or sometimes earlier, locked up almost all their lives or sometimes their entire lives through no fault of their own. Those children are at high risk of radicalization, both from their moms who were in ISIS and from the fact that they’ve been locked up in very poor conditions for reasons they have no control over. When the boys reach adolescence they’re separated from their moms and sent to supposed rehabilitation facilities that are prisons all but in name.
There are still tens of thousands of women and children in the detention camps. Everyone is afraid to let them out basically. Many of their countries of nationality don’t want to take them back and have either outright refused or are stalling, dragging it out for as long as possible. Syria doesn’t want to release them into the general public for the same reason, and many of the women and kids have no documents. So the situation persists, coming to a slow boil as those children get older every day.
Think how long it’s been already is my point. Think how your kids are now compared to 2019.
Man, if only al Nusrah let him join, he could be visiting the White House as part of the new president of Syria's entourage. 🙃
The fortunes of war.
It’s 2025 and we have neoliberal jihadis. Beautiful.
He probably would've died if he fought for 11 whole years.
Religion is some crazy shit.
Reading the whole thing it sounds like he was moreso a naive idiot than a genuinely bad person. Like the Syrian Government and Bashar Al Asad were bad, he wasn't wrong about that.
Yeah. Maybe don’t join a militia/terrorist/cult group based on what a stranger says whom you randomly bumped into, without at least Googling it first.
Lmao
Does this count as natural selection?
Hope they all suffered 🙏
I strongly suspect that Western nations considered ISIS/ISUL an easy way of getting rid of radicalised young Muslims. Young people are easier to radicalise, but if they have some place to travel to where they are very likely to get themselves killed within a year, they do not become a problem.
This is why many of those who travelled to Iraq and Syria were either not allowed back into the EU nations they left or were imprisoned after their return.
Tackling systemic racism would prevent radicalisation among young Muslim people to become a long-term ideological stance. Being dissatisfied with the status quo is normal and healthy for young people. It is a driver for progressive change in many instances. Allowing them to get themselves killed rather than protecting them from being recruited as child/ recent adult soldiers is very cynical.
I agree. Especially as many of these men (not Jaman, but a lot of them) were criminals before they joined ISIS.
That’s a very cold analysis and I think there were a lot of cops and people in national security who felt that way.
100% agree. Both racism and Islamophobia (which is often rooted in racism) should not be tolerated. There was one family I read about, the uncle was wrongfully imprisoned in Guantanamo, and his nephews lived in an English village where people threw stones at their house calling them racist and Islamaphobic slurs and their father (the uncle’s brother) was violent towards their mother.
Of the four boys: one went to Syria and joined the Nusra Front. Two of his younger brothers, age 16 and 17-old, followed him there and also joined the Nusra Front. The 16-year-old was killed, and the 17-year-old was killed just after his 18th birthday. The fourth brother (a twin to the 16-year-old who died in Syria) stayed home and was murdered in drug related incident. There is one brother who was still alive in Syria as of 2020 but I don’t know if he still is.
I expect that those that become radicalized to radical islam tend to commit terrorism at home more often than travelling halfway across the world to do it.
They're terrorists. Literal, actual, card-carrying terrorists. Of course they would not be allowed to return and be arrested if they tried. They joined organizations that commit murder and slaughter. It would be like not arresting people for joining the mafia.
In another comment I mentioned Ahmed Halane. He is Somali descent and had Danish and British citizenship. In 2013 at age 20 he left Britain and went to Somalia where he fought with the terrorist group Al Shabaab, then later that same year he went to Syria where he joined ISIS. In 2014, his 16-year-old twin sisters left Britain and also joined in ISIS in Syria.
Ahmed left ISIS at some point (not sure if before or after his sisters came to Syria). The UK barred him from re-entry (and probably took his British citizenship off him also) but Denmark didn’t, and he lives in Denmark freely today and hasn’t been charged with terror offenses. I don’t understand why he hasn’t been charged.
He works as a Quran teacher now, both in-person and online. He posts on Facebook advertising his services and also posts of himself meeting various religious scholars from across the Muslim world. It appears he still has his passport even. I don’t understand why he wasn’t put in prison for joining two different terrorist organizations. I hope he really has gone straight and no longer supports that sort of thing.
His sisters, last I heard, were imprisoned after they tried to escape a detention camp in Syria. I’d like to write an entry about them.
Did not expect that of Denmark of all countries.
I think Ahmed must have left pretty early on. His sisters had British-Danish citizenship too, and Denmark hasn’t taken them back. I think Denmark must have passed a law making it illegal to join the conflict in Syria after Ahmed left but before his sisters joined.
Ahmed, on his Facebook page, posted a link to an article about the terrible conditions in the Syria refugee/detention camps without noting that his own sisters were in there. I’m sure he doesn’t want his jihadist past or his jihadist relatives mess up his Quran teaching business.
I certainly wouldn’t hire the man to teach my kid if I were a Muslim. He’s probably very qualified to teach Quran (I’ve read he memorized the whole thing by age 13) but there’s plenty of qualified Quran teachers without that kind of terrorist baggage.
You need to tackle religious extremism, not systemic racism to fix this issue. I say that as a visible minority.
“The literal terrorists are actually the victims!” Come on. You fight Islamic extremism by fighting Islamic extremism, not “racism”.
I think some Muslims are driven into Islamic extremism by their experience of racism and Islamaphobia.
So will the mods close this one, as they closed the post about 2015-2016 New Year's Eve assaults in Europe?
Ah so I wasn't going crazy, why would they be remove it I wonder?
Well, it seems that you can't have both multiculturalism and free speech
Does anyone hear a high pitched whistle and dogs barking?
We've got British citizens joining the Israeli army which is currently carrying out a 2 year genocide to expand their settlements as well.
2/10 bait
Is it untrue?
More like it’s neither here nor there. Nothing to do with this post.
Well we had a Jewish ethnostate for decades before ISIS was a thing. Both are populated by non native radicals.
This is so dumb on so many levels. Where are Jews native to? You can convert to Judaism and recieve a passport, like any other naturalisation process, so how is it an ethnostate? Israel has democracy and affords an equal vote to every citizen. It's a funcitonal modern country. Comparison to ISIS says much more about you than it does about Israel.
You just don't want to admit it because it would expose your double standard.
If you genuinely believe that is true, why aren't you doing remotely anything about it?
You've described yourself as truly believing mass murder is occurring and are also choosing to physically do nothing about it. Its like extremist Christians claiming abortion clinics are centers for murder while doing nothing outside of screeching at others about it and displaying outrage. The crazies that actually believed they were stopping murder responded with force they considered appropriate, they bombed clinics and killed people they misguidedly believed were the culprit.
Why should anybody follow this logic if you're not even sold on it?
You certainly can write all of that. Given that you don't know anything about most people on this platform, it's all assumptions, maybe a bit of projection as well.
Witnesses to murder will usually stop it, why aren't you? Or... anybody from the West?
Now I remember! Its cause the entire movement is predicated on a specious argument only the terminally online seethe over.
The war in Gaza is over when are you people going to move on. Yall expected a genocide to happen and it didn’t so now yall just pretend it did like a ceasefire wasn’t exactly what you were asking for.
It was never a war and the fact that you call it that shows how twisted your mindset is. Israel has killed hundreds of people since the "ceasefire" began. You people are deranged.
“It was never a war. Sure we started it by attacking you, and could’ve ended it whenever we wanted, and the terrorist group who started it still runs Gaza, but it’s not a war because you didn’t just let us kill you”.
Israel has been carrying out mass killings for decades in both Gaza and the west bank, expanding settlements etc using state backed militias and the literal army to attack civilians. They build brutally cruel infrastructure forcing Palestinians into smaller and smaller areas to make space for settlers. Thousands and thousands of individual incidents with video evidence to back this up plus every major human rights organisation agrees with what I've just wrote. Just because you've arbitrarily started the conflict on October 7th doesn't mean anyone else just forgot history. You can't hide behind your lies forever.
By the definition of terrorist. The IDF and the Israeli government/army are far more prolific terrorists. You just have a double standard because you view one group as superior.
I love how you put that in quotation marks as if you didn't make that little straw man up yourself.
You people say “this didn’t start in Oct 7” to mean “look at 1948 then skip to Oct 7” and try to get us to ignore the decades of Palestine being the agresor and Israel trying peace.
How are expanding settlements using violent militias and armed forces "trying peace"?
I also don’t see how this doesn’t make it a war.
It's not a war because one side doesn't have an army.
Hamas is not only still around, as soon as the war ended they purged opposition.
Hamas is not an army
They’ve got armed soldiers, how is that not an army.
same style of nutters, but Israel is much more acceptable to the "jewish" community then ISIS was to the biritsh one...
Head Rabbi's son went last month, he calls them "our" soldiers, gross.
Problem fixed itself
“British”
Born and raised in Portsmouth, did in customer service at a call center, couldn’t speak a word of Arabic. Yes, British.
So this guy is responsible for the deaths of multiple ISIS fighters? He's a hero!
Not really, more isis fighters means more civilians killed probably, even if they ultimately died themselves
we hate extremists and really questioned who crated this . plus we shouldn’t glorify extremist .
but deliberately writing on no-name terrorist by OP in a wikipedia entry is a “invert” way to do islamophobia. this is a propaganda at work.
He was not a “no name terrorist.” He had a lot of articles about him both before and after his death and he was also the focus of a book. If he was a no-name terrorist I wouldn’t have been able to find 17 references, all naming him, for his entry.
Also in what way does the Wikipedia entry glorify Ifthekar Jaman? He made a series of terrible decisions and then died for basically no reason.
The second part of the title is written like it’s a bad thing, but if anything I wish he’d convinced even more radicalised scum to go and die for absolutely nothing.
I think it’s very sad that all those young men could have chosen a different path but instead they took this one, and died for basically no reason. They wasted their lives. It’s a tremendous gift to be alive at all, think of all the things that had to happen at very specific times for you to be born as yourself. And they threw their lives away.
You do realise isis committed atrocities, right? More isis fighters means more civilians killed, even if they ultimately ended up dead themselves
Lmao
Not to worry you, but a person like you was set up and radicalised by the Australian Federal Police. You probably shouldn't be so open about your interests even if it's not your fault.
I am a mature adult (40 years old) and not easily influenced. I do not support terrorism and as an atheist I could not be convinced to become a jihadist or support that kind of thing. My interest is mainly in why so many Westerners were convinced to leave their comfortable lives and join a death cult in a war zone, sometimes taking young children with them.
[edited to add] by “death cult” I mean ISIS not Islam. I’m aware that ISIS is abhorred by most of the world’s Muslims and does not represent their views.
We needed that edit so badly big guy we were so ready to pounce
I'm just looking out for a stranger.
I understand! I am just assuring you that it’s unlikely to happen in my case.
Was it tho? Denying other's their own agency isn't looking out.
Law enforcement does have a history of preying upon autistic individuals and exploiting their vulnerabilities to entrap them into situations where they wind up getting arrested for serious criminal offenses. I have read of multiple such cases.
Has that been ever been your case? Spare me the reddit spiels.
No but I’ve read news accounts of it happening to other people.