Mick Hartley

Michael Totten, in his latest piece, cites a report from George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, which argues  that the return of ISIS fighters to the US – and presumably the same holds for the UK – may not be the security nightmare that was feared. Basically, disillusionment rather than a hardening of their extremism seems to be the commonest response to those still left alive after the nightmare they've lived through.

ISIS promised a utopian society and paradise for its warriors. The reality was something else, a one-way ticket to a Hobbesian world of cruelty, violence and drudgery.

“The propaganda,” concludes the report, “while enthralling, presented an idealized version of reality, meaning that their real-world experience upon arrival was often jarring. Living conditions were much harsher than they saw in the online magazines and videos, and the promises of companionship and camaraderie were rarely fulfilled. Instead, cultural clashes, bitter infighting, and suspicion among recruits and leaders abounded.”…

To be sure, young men who suddenly find themselves rising from anonymous nobodies to exalted fighters in the vanguard of a rising new movement can find their status and ego inflated, even by gigantic proportions, but most American recruits ended up washing dishes and cleaning latrines, jobs that at least paid something back home….

The ISIS dupes are a bit like the sad South Koreans lured to North Korea by communist propaganda in the mid-20^th century. They encountered one horrific shock after another once they arrived in Kim Il Sung’s mythical worker’s paradise, but by then it was too late. They couldn’t go home.

ISIS barely even exists anymore except as an idea and an abstraction. Its Islamic “state,” such as it was, has been dismantled. The real threat doesn’t come from those who return from the losing side on the pitiable battlefield but from those like Omar Mateen, who murdered 49 people and wounded 58 more at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando two years ago, persuaded to do so by jihadist propaganda online. Unlike the 300 or so who defected from the United States to the caliphate, he never saw the nightmare Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi created up close and in person. Those like him who choose to stay and fight at home are the ones we most need to worry about.

I'm not entirely convinced, but I hope he's right.