DAILY BEAST: The flow of foreign fighters to Syria to join the war against Bashar Assad’s dictatorship is becoming the largest in the history of the global jihad, and the Syrian battleground is on the way to outstripping the 1980s Afghan war against the Soviets as a training ground for Islamic militants. Security services around the world are becoming increasingly alarmed at the implications for the safety of their citizens…
Virtually every country in Western Europe has reported that some of itsMuslim citizens have gone to Syria. A small but significant number have died in the war and become martyrs back in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and other states with sizable Muslim minorities. Even tiny Luxembourg has had one jihadi martyr already. Americans are now fighting in Syria as well…
The blowback from the Afghan war was massive and enduring. As early as 1991 Algerian veterans of the Afghan war were a critical ingredient in starting the Algerian civil war that ultimately claimed an estimated 150,000 lives. Afghan veterans in Egypt played a role in the wave of terror that swept Cairo and other Egyptian cities in the 1990s. The Who’s Who of the Global Jihad is full of Afghan war veterans from bin Laden to his successor the Egyptian Ayman Zawahiri, who was a doctor in the refugee camps during the war. Of course the most dangerous blowback of the war was the role it played in creating the ideology of global jihad. The father of that ideology was an Afghan war veteran, Abdallah Azzam, a Palestinian who was Bin Laden’s first partner in attracting foreign fighters to come to Afghanistan… (more)
