Why They Joined ISIS: To Make Friends and Earn a Good Wage

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/34969-why-they-joined-isis-to-make-friends-and-earn-a-good-wage

All his adult life, Kareem had tried, and failed, to find steady work in Haditha. In the early hours of the morning, he wandered the streets looking for a construction worker who might want to hire a casual laborer for the day. If he was lucky, he might earn $10, but more often than not he returned home empty-handed. As soon as darkness fell, in the absence of electricity, he went to sleep. At night, he dreamed he was a child again, playing with his neighbors’ children in the streets after class.

Those days were long behind him, no more so than now, languishing in a Kirkuk prison, slumped in a steel chair, his wrists bound. Kareem said he didn’t know much about Abu Aya, the enigmatic ISIS recruiter who first appeared in Haditha in 2014. He was inscrutable: walking alone and never engaging in public confrontations. But for Kareem, this quietly religious man offered him a way out of the poverty and despair that had come to characterize his life.

“I went to school, but my family couldn’t pay for [my food], so I quit school to be able to work to help them,” Kareem said, a solitary tear making its way down his right cheek. “I wanted to do anything else other than being a [casual] labor worker. I was very tired of that job.”

Kareem is one of the thousands of young Iraqi men to have joined ISIS in 2014. He joined a movement of people desperate for a way out of their dire financial straits. In the fall of 2014, the CIA estimated that as many as 31,500 people were members of the Sunni militant group — from Tunisia to Egypt, from Syria to France, from Afghanistan to Indonesia. While experts say some members of the group join because they believe in its extremist ideology, many sign up because they are young, uneducated, poor and vulnerable, not dissimilar to gang members in cities across the United States.