Interior ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka named one of the attackers as Abdirahim Abdullahi, saying he was “a university of Nairobi law graduate and described by a person who knows him well as a brilliant upcoming lawyer.”
The spokesman said Abdullahi’s father, a local official in the northeastern county of Mandera, had “reported to the authorities that his son had gone missing and suspected the boy had gone to Somalia”.
This is far from the first example. Lots of terrorists (and not always terrorist leaders, but quite often rank-and-file terrorists) are well-educated and come from middle-to-upper class backgrounds. The frequency of it happening makes it hard to think of such cases as exceptions.
Is it that frequent though? I assume we hear about the unusual cases. ISIS has tens of thousands of fighters, right? I’d think vast majority of those are ignorant hill-folk.
Well most people assume that the American military is mostly drawn from the underclass but that’s apparently not true. So I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar holds for another all volunteer military force.
I think there’s an element of supply and demand going on here. As an organization begins to desire highly skilled workers more, they become more willing to grant high-level positions to those workers, which makes joining the organization more appealing. Eventually some sort of balance is reached. Presumably, these guys are not joining to be low-level workers—or to the extent they are, they’re becoming front line combat troops and not ditch diggers.
And then, as Lobohan points out, we here about these cases a lot more because they’re high status people before and after they join, so they get more attention.
You cannot answer the question without defining terrorism. I’m assuming the OP does not consider, say, the death of James Byrd to be terrorism. But if you really include any ideologically-motivated violence, as seems to the standard applied to Muslims, then I doubt there is much of a pattern in terms of class or intelligence.
I think the debate is: what are the class demographics of a (typical?) terrorist organization? Though that’s a little broad and would be better focused on a specific one. They do have different recruitment methods. Some are all volunteers and some take children hostage to become soldiers.
I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if well-educated and highly intelligent became the high-level leaders in terrorist organizations. What is surprising is how well-educated and highly intelligent become low-level cannon fodder terrorists as exemplified in the OP.
Not that surprising to me. What makes terrorist organizations attractive is the same thing, in a perverse sense, that makes civic organizations and social movements attractive: a pervasive feeling that the participant is making the world a better place and rooting out evil. Groups like Boko Haram and ISIS provide disillusioned young people with a sense that they are fighting on behalf of something much greater than themselves and enablesthem to find meaning in their lives. Viewed this way, then, characters like the one mentioned in the OP are not suckers who got taken for a ride but rational actors who got exactly what they were looking for.
You should know better than to think that a census of ISIS would exist. What we do know is that western intelligence estimates ISIS at 20,000-31,500 members, and about 3,400 of them are westerners. That would seem to indicate that the bulk of members are from the Middle East and other third world regions, and thus are probably not “highly educated, intelligent, or rich”.
Its weak evidence, but its something. If you think ISIS is mostly upper-class rich kids, prove it.
Well I posted a link above indicating that the US military is not mostly poor people joining up. Why should your assumption be the default?
It’s unlikely ISIS is all rich kids. But a common narrative, apparently unbacked, is that it’s mostly poor desperate people. Shouldn’t that assumption be examined? Terr didn’t say it was mostly upper class, merely that he’s seen enough rich kids implicated to start doubting the common narrative.
The Kenyan from the OP was definitely from a “third world region”. Yet he was highly educated, intelligent and (probably, based on the fact that he was from the family of a government official) relatively rich. And I have no idea whether most ISIS membership comes from relatively educated, intelligent and rich backgrounds or not. But neither do you.
But I think the differences between the US military and ISIS are too broad to draw a conclusion from one that is applicable to the other. US armed forces strive for a high degree of professionalism, and are selective in their recruitment–high school degree required, no criminal record, etc. ISIS is just competent enough to commit atrocities and seems to take whoever shows up. So I’m don’t think that we can make any inferences from the link you posted.
I do think that we should look into the assumption that ISIS is composed of poor and ignorant people. But I think that the narrative holds up under closer scrutiny.
I agree you can’t simply map the stats from the US military onto ISIS but I think it shows that it’s not safe to assume it’s mostly poor people who volunteer to go shoot and be shot at.
As “terrorist” is basically the next step after “radical”, and radicals disproportionately come from the educated middle and upper classes, it’s no surprise that lots of terrorists come from well-off backgrounds.
Well, let’s see…I’m highly educated and intelligent, but I’m not rich. But if I hit the lottery, there isn’t a chance in hell I’d go running around blowing shit up.
