From Freedom Fighters to Jihadists: Human Resources of Non-State Armed Groups

345 Pages·2019·13.506 MB·English

by  Vera Mironova

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From Freedom Fighters to Jihadists
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CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF
TERRORISM SERIES
Series Editors:
Gary LaFree
Gary A. Ackerman
Anthony Lemieux
books in the series:
From Freedom Fighters to Jihadists: Human Resources of Non-S tate
Armed Groups
Vera Mironova
Published in partnership with The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism
and Responses to Terrorism and the University of Maryland
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From Freedom Fighters
to Jihadists
Human Resources of Non- State
Armed Groups
Edited by
VERA MIRONOVA
Visiting Fellow, Harvard University
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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© University of Maryland 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mironova, V. G. (Vera Grigor’evna), author.
Title: From Freedom Fighters to Jihadists: Human Resources of Non-State
Armed Groups / Vera Mironova.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2019. |
Series: Causes and consequences of terrorism
Identifiers: LCCN 2018057012 | ISBN 9780190939762 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780190939755 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Terrorism—Syria—History—21st century. |
Syria—Politics and government—21st century. |
BISAC: PSYCHOLOGY / Social Psychology.
Classification: LCC HV6433.S95 M57 2019 | DDC 956.9104/231—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057012
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Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
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This book is dedicated to the memory of all the people who died on all sides of
the war in Iraq and Syria.
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1
1. Armed Groups Human Resource Manual 25
2. Leaving, Staying, Fighting 47
3. Finding a Group That Fits 67
4. Making a Rebel Group Work 85
5. Help from Abroad 101
6. Handling Foreign Fighters 135
7. Handling Ultra- Radicals 173
8. Managing Ideology 209
9. Funding the Fight 229
10. Rebel CEOs and Managers 249
11. Policy Implications 271
Other Conflicts and Ideologies 295
Index 303
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Preface
“10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7  . . . ”
An Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) officer would count back-
ward after sending the GPS coordinates for a target building to the air-
craft circling above us. The countdown was the ten seconds it took for the
building to disappear in a mushroom of dust and enemy fighters to disap-
pear under the debris. Once that was done, we would move out of hiding
and continue down the narrow streets of the Old City of Mosul, trying hard
to be as quiet as possible; the enemy was hiding not only in the destroyed
buildings on both sides, but often below in tunnels.
As we went, the soldiers casually stepped over the bloated bodies of
enemy combatants in their signature uniforms complete with suicide belts.
They had been left to rot there for weeks under the hot Iraqi sun, and occa-
sionally someone would wonder out loud why those bodies were still there,
like they were some kind of abandoned roadblocks. The soldiers considered
these once-m en solely as objects, but I didn’t. I saw them from a different
angle. These were not stones or fallen trees so inconveniently blocking the
way. They used to be people, people who had made decisions in life that
brought them to the spot where they lay.
At this point I, an academic, had been embedded with ISOF for ten
months. I had begun my research on rebel fighters in the Middle East five
years prior, and it had led me there, among their lives and deaths, and in
close proximity to the organizations that facilitated both.
In life, those people had once been part of a feared rebel organization.
They had fought, lived and trained in camps, reported to their chain of com-
mand, slept on bunkbeds in shifts, and ate in the dining hall on long plastic
tables. They lived like those in any other similar institution, except for an
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) twist to some details, like a sign
on the door of a camp I once visited. The sign could be roughly translated
as, “Dear Brother Jihadists, for everything holy on this planet, please wash
the dishes. God bless you.” That made me pause for a second. If fighters did
not care about such a mundane thing as doing dishes (that the sign had to