Foreign fighters in Iraq: A cross-national analysis of Jihadism

Terrorism and Political Violence

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 211-220

  Hewitt, Christopher ^a   Kelley Moore, Jessica ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND BALTIMORE COUNTY   (United States)

^b CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Economic development; Foreign fighters; Iraq; Jihadism; Military 'occupation'; Muslim societies; Religiosity

Indexed keywords

EID: 67749147375     PISSN: 09546553     EISSN: 15561836     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09546550802544839     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Anthony Cordesman, Iraq and Foreign Volunteers (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, November 2005) describes the insurgency as "largely homegrown" and cites Saudi sources for the numbers of Iraqi and foreign fighters. Only about three percent of those detained are foreigners.
2. The updated statistics of Paz can be found on info@globalterroralert.com. The Assyrian International News Agency cites Iraq's Human Rights Minister as the source for their statistics. "Foreign fighters captured in Iraq come from 27, mostly Arab, lands," New York Times, October 21, 2005, A10.
3. All Asian and North African countries with a population of over half-a-million are included, with the exception of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, for which no reliable statistics could be found.
4. The records found in the Sinjar camp contained detailed, individual level information on such things as age, occupation, how recruited, etc. For a good analysis of this material see Brian Fishman, ed., Bombers, Bank Accounts and Bleedout (Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, 2008), 32-62. However, after noting the variation in the sending rates among countries, the matter is not investigated further. Our study focuses on these cross-national differences.
5. The Saudi estimates are somewhat suspicious in that the Saudi jihadist numbers are very low compared to all other published figures. The smuggler cell sample, as the New York Times article points out, refer to those who came across the northern border of Iraq and obviously do not include jihadists who entered by other routes. Hence no Kuwaitis or other Gulf state nationalities are included. The large number of Libyans is also surprising. See "Foreign fighters in Iraq are tied to allies of US," New York Times, November 22, 2007, A1, A8.
6. Once we accounted for other key factors (Human Development Index, Hajj rates, and occupation), being adjacent to Iraq ceased to be a significant predictor and was dropped from the final multivariate analysis.
7. Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 111, 119. Charles Krauthammer argues that the root causes of the September 11 attack were "The cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world - oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism." See "Fukuyama's Fantasy," Washington Post, March 28, 2006.
8. Fawaz Gergez, The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 268.
9. The Corruption Perceptions Index is compiled at the University of Passau in Germany on behalf of Transparency International. It has been published since 1995 and is based on expert assessments and opinion surveys.
10. Mohammed Hafez, Suicide Bombers in Iraq (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2007), 219.
11. For a discussion of Jihad, see Lewis (note 7 above), 33, John Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 30-31, "Jihad and the Professors," in Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), and Mary Habeck, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 109-111.
12. Figures as to the importance of religion in the Pew Global Attitudes survey of 2002 are available for only five Muslim-majority countries.
13. Robert Bianchi, Guests of God: Pilgrimage and Politics in the Islamic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Bianchi points out that other factors such as ease of travel to Mecca and national politics also affect the rate. Although it would be preferable to have more recent statistics, the changes from year to year are unlikely to change the relative rankings of the cases in our sample. He does not provide separate figures for the ex-Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan nor for Saudi Arabia. Rates for these countries have been calculated from Gulnoza Saidazimova, "Central Asia: Pilgrims depart for Hajj" Eurasianet.org (January 4, 2006). For Saudi Arabia the official figures include non-Saudi residents, and have been adjusted by assuming that the difference in rates between Saudis and non-Saudis was the same as reported in David Long, The Hajj Today (SUNY Press, 1979).
14. Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
15. Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005).
16. Pape's definition of occupation is unusual and we discuss it below.
17. Hafez (see note 10 above), 215.
18. Zaki Chehab, Inside the Resistance: The Iraqi Insurgency and the Future of the Middle East (New York: Nation Books, 2005), 52.
19. Pape (see note 15 above) 84, 89, 95.
20. See John Hartigan, Clustering Algorithms (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975).
21. Do foreign military forces have to be based in the country? Does it matter if the U.S. troops were invited in, or came to defend the country from an actual (Kuwait) or threatened attack (Saudi Arabia)? See Assaf Moghadam, "Suicide Terrorism, Occupation, and the Globalization of Martyrdom: A Critique of Dying to Win," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29, no. 8 (December 2006), 707-729.