“It’s boring in Belgium.”
Remember that line. It was spoken by a typical jihadi who left his boring Belgian life, sheltered by the pious, bland welfare state, to kill and die in Syria. Boredom and easy travel sent these guys on their way, not oppression. A hard look at where the foreign fighters come from will show that.
Take Indonesia, by far the biggest Muslim-majority country on the planet. There are about 238 million people in Indonesia, and 88% (209 million) are Muslim. The Indonesian population skews very young, and when you break it down by age and gender, you end up with at least 40 million males of military age from Muslim backgrounds. That’s the available pool of jihadi recruits.
So, how many jihadis has Indonesia contributed to Islamic State?
About 60, maybe 70. Not 70 thousand, you understand; 70 guys. A miserable two-digit total, about a platoon and a half. Hell, let’s be generous and double that figure, make it 140 men. Triple it! Fine with me! It’s still going to amount to something very close to zero-point-zero Indonesian volunteers in Iraq/Syria.
It’s not that Indonesia is short on militant Islam. There are plenty of homegrown Indonesian groups, some of them extremely violent—remember the Bali Bombings of 2002, when a couple of hundred party kids were burned alive? That was an all-Indonesian production, and there was plenty of sympathy for the bombers. It also means that would-be jihadis in Indonesia have plenty of local groups to join. They’re too poor to go to Syria, it’s too far away, and they have opportunities nearer home.
Those same considerations keep young Muslim men from a whole tier of poor countries from contributing to IS. Take Yemen. You’d expect Yemen to provide a huge contingent to IS, because Yemenis are hands-down the toughest Arabs. But there are very few Yemenis in IS, fewer per capita than from the UK, France, or Belgium. That, again, is a very odd stat.
And you see the same thing with a whole tier of poor, distant Muslim countries. How many IS volunteers from Kazakhstan? From Sudan? From Pakistan? Same answer in every case: Damn few, too few to show up in the charts at all.
And the same reasons keep these numbers down: Poverty, distance, fighting to be done close to home.
So who does join IS from far away? Let’s look at an outlier in the other direction: Belgium.
Everything about Belgium says it shouldn’t be making any significant contribution to the jihad in Iraq/Syria. First, the total population is tiny, less than 11 million people, and unlike the Indonesian population it skews very old. The total number of males of military age in Belgium is less than one million, or about two percent of the equivalent in Indonesia. And unlike Indonesia, Belgium is not a Muslim-majority nation. In fact, only six percent of Belgium is Muslim—call it 600,000 people. Let’s say that the Muslim minority in Belgium skews younger than the general population, as recent immigrant minorities usually do. That still means a total pool of something like 70,000. But from that tiny pool, Belgium has sent at least 350 volunteers to Islamic State.
Of course, that’s still a tiny number. It’s worth repeating that all these numbers are ridiculously small, considering the pool of Muslim young men who could be taking up jihad. But Belgium is still an anomaly, producing way too many IS volunteers. Never mind what’s wrong with Kansas, what’s up with Belgium?
Two things: first, that comment “it’s boring in Belgium.” Why is it boring? Consider the huge change in Europe after the great de-fanging of 1945. For certain countries, going o’er the waves to kill and die had been part of the national tradition for generations. Look at which countries relied most heavily on those foreign imperial ambitions in the early 20th century, and you get a surprising match-up with the non-Muslim majority countries with the highest rate of Islamic State volunteers. The states with the highest per capita rates are the ones that formed part of the most aggressive overseas empires of the last century: Turkey, England, France, and Belgium. All these countries have suffered a sudden shrinkage, from ruling distant outposts to maybe, if you’re lucky, getting an office job in the boring ol’ home country, such as it is, what’s left of it.
Up until the middle of the 20th century, a British, French, or Belgian male who’d attained his eighteenth birthday would have a chance of lording it over somebody far away in the hot countries, with a weapon in his hand, a man to be feared and obeyed. Not a nice dream, maybe, but let’s be honest enough to admit that it’s not exactly an uncommon one, either, especially among males in their late teens—and IS recruits, by the way, skew very young.
The dream was there for the white British and French and Belgian young men; why is it surprising that it should persist among a later generation of brown young men from those same cities (though quite a lot of white young men in those countries have converted and joined IS as well).
