{"id":74131,"date":"2016-05-23T12:00:21","date_gmt":"2016-05-23T11:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=74131"},"modified":"2016-05-23T11:27:09","modified_gmt":"2016-05-23T10:27:09","slug":"trauma-and-deprivation-lead-syrian-youths-to-extremist-groups-says-new-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/05\/trauma-and-deprivation-lead-syrian-youths-to-extremist-groups-says-new-report\/","title":{"rendered":"Trauma and Deprivation Lead Syrian Youths to Extremist Groups, Says New Report"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/a>

A Syrian man holds the body of his son, killed by the Syrian Army, near Dar El Shifa hospital in Aleppo on Oct. 3, 2012.<\/p><\/div>\n

19 May 2016 – <\/em>The primary factors driving Syrian youths toward extremist groups are deprivation and personal trauma\u00a0stemming from five years of civil war in the country, according to a report from International Alert, a British organization. Titled \u201cWhy Young Syrians Choose to Fight<\/a>,\u201d the report is based on interviews with 311 Syrians living in northern Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey.<\/p>\n

The prime drivers for extremism were\u00a0personal experiences of trauma, loss of economic and educational opportunities, and a desire for vengeance against the Syrian government, according to the British NGO. The Syrian respondents said these practical factors, rather than ideological beliefs, led many young men to support groups like Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State.<\/p>\n

With unemployment reaching 90 percent in some areas of the country and no end in sight to the conflict, many of those interviewed\u00a0said that a simple need to survive\u00a0drove\u00a0many youths to join with militants, whether they agreed with their ideology or not. \u201cThe economic situation for young men, inside Syria, is\u00a0bad,\u201d said one respondent living in the Syrian province of Idlib. \u201cThey are only able to survive by joining a military faction either to receive\u00a0salaries or for robbery and waylaying.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another individual interviewed for the report, issued earlier this month, told the story of an 18-year-old who had been fighting with a Free Syrian Army unit that was unable to even maintain a supply of bullets. Despite disagreeing with the group\u2019s\u00a0ideology, the\u00a0young\u00a0man later joined Jabhat al-Nusra after it\u00a0offered him bullets as well as a salary to continue fighting the government.<\/p>\n

The civil war that started in 2011 following a government crackdown on peaceful protests has now claimed<\/a> up to 470,000 lives, according to some estimates. Out of\u00a0a pre-war population of 22 million, over 11 percent of the Syrian population is now believed to have been killed or injured.\u00a0Average\u00a0life expectancy<\/a>\u00a0has plummeted\u00a0from 75 to 55 years. Millions more Syrians have become refugees in neighboring countries or in Europe.<\/p>\n

These staggering numbers\u00a0have left few Syrian families untouched, and have had a profound psychological impact on those left behind. Many of those interviewed in the\u00a0report said\u00a0that a desire to avenge atrocities drives many Syrian youth into the arms of extremists, particularly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al Qaeda. Established by al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri after the 2011 uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Jabhat al-Nusra is widely viewed as one of the most effective fighting forces on the ground against Assad\u2019s regime.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany Syrians want to get revenge against the regime for destroying their\u00a0families, houses, lives and everything else,\u201d one Syrian, now living in Turkey, told the researchers. \u201cJabhat al-Nusra actually fights\u00a0the regime and now offers the best chance to get that revenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Syrians interviewed overwhelmingly cited practical rather than ideological reasons for joining militant groups. \u201cBelief in extreme ideologies appears to be \u2014 at most \u2014 a secondary\u00a0factor in the decision to join an extremist group,\u201d the study stated, noting\u00a0that \u201creligion is providing a moral\u00a0medium for coping and justification for fighting, rather than a basis for rigid and\u00a0extreme ideologies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many young Syrians cited religious belief as something that obligated them to \u201cdefend their country\u201d and \u201cdefend oppressed people\u201d from the Syrian government. A young man in\u00a0Aleppo told researchers that Syrian youths also became more religious after experiencing abandonment by other Arab and Islamic countries, as well as the sectarian policies of the Assad regime. Simple existential fear also led to increasing religious conservatism, he added: \u201cBecause of the ongoing shelling, youth became more\u00a0religious for fear of sudden death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amarnath Amarasingam, a fellow at George Washington University\u2019s Program on Extremism, says the study\u2019s findings comport with his own research. \u201cMany Syrians\u00a0have told me that\u00a0the conflict is in many ways all-consuming, so if these youth want a future inside Syria, to go to school again without interruptions, build a family, and so on, it means contributing to bringing the war to an end,\u201d he\u00a0says. The spirit that\u00a0animated the 2011 uprising against Assad still motivates many young Syrians, Amarasingam says, adding\u00a0that a\u00a0desire for political change among youth has increased after years of government brutality.<\/p>\n

But for many others, taking up arms has been\u00a0a matter of simple survival.\u00a0\u201cOur focus on jihadism means that we tend to ignore the many other youth who, out of sheer necessity, picked up a weapon to protect their villages from bombs dropping from the sky,\u201d Amarasingam says. \u201cI\u2019m not sure what else we expect them to do at this point.\u201d<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

Murtaza Hussain<\/a> – \u2709murtaza.hussain@theintercept.com<\/a> – @mazmhussain<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Syrian youths overwhelmingly cite practical rather than ideological reasons for joining militant groups after five years of civil war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-syria-in-context"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}