Sebastian Rotella takes note of the unprecedented wave of radicalization driving Muslims in Europe to join jihadists in Syria:
“Imagine this: Between 2001 and 2010, we identified 50 jihadists who went from France to Afghanistan,” said a senior French counterterror official who also requested anonymity. “Surely there were more, but we identified 50. With Syria, in one year, we have already identified 135. It has been very fast and strong.”
The statistics are even stronger in adjoining Belgium, one-sixth the size of France. Between 100 and 300 jihadis have journeyed from Belgium’s extremist enclaves to Syria, according to a veteran Belgian counterterror official. Other significant fighting contingents represent Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Canada, Central Asia, Libya, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia. The senior French official estimated the total number of Europeans to be at least 400. Others say it could be double that, but counterterror officials warn that precise numbers are difficult to establish.
Update from a reader:
While there can be no doubt that the conflict in Syria has stirred the passions of radical elements within Islamic culture, I think it’s worth casting a suspicious eye on Rotella’s statistics on the “jihadists” who have fled France and Belgium for the war in Syria, and the comparison he makes to the Afghan war. Syria was, after all, a French colony for years, and French is a commonly spoken language there.
That there are a substantially higher proportion of immigrants of Syrian descent living in both France and Belgium than those of Afghan descent. France doesn’t even make the top-10 list of countries playing host to Afghan refugees.
Rotella’s use of the indifferentiate term “jihadists,” imagining a unified front of de-nationalized, radical Muslims bent on the destruction of the West, hides the most logical cause of these departures for the battlefields of Syria: a lot of these young men are culturally connected to Syria. Do you honestly think the European police forces distinguish between “jihadists” of the Al-Qaeda sort, and other politically motivated Arabs…say those whose families were harmed by the current Baathist regime in Syria? Nuance has never been the strong suit of those characterizing the motivations for action among Arabic speaking Muslims.
Again, I don’t question that a portion of those who have joined the fight in Syria see this as step-one in a battle against the Great Satan. But to characterize this as an “unprecedented wave of radicalization” rather than a not-unsurprising response to cultural connections in that same, mundane way that the Irish Catholics of Boston were more interested in the goings-on of the IRA than the German Catholics of Missouri, is rhetorically inflammatory and sheds more heat than light.
The Dish 