What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism by Alan B. Krueger

Author:Alan B. Krueger
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-01-22T05:00:00+00:00

Appendix 2.2: The National Origins of Foreign Fighters in Iraq

From President Bush on down to military press officers in Iraq, the U.S. government has singled out foreign fighters as a serious obstacle to establishing stability and the rule of law in Iraq. While small in number compared with domestic insurgents, foreigners have been blamed for some of the worst acts of violence in the years since the Iraq invasion.8 For example, Major General Rick Lynch, a spokesman for the Multi-National Force–Iraq, said, “We believe that a major piece—not numerically but in terms of the effects of their attacks—of the insurgency is terrorists and foreign fighters” (Lynch, 2005). And President Bush has stated, “Some of the violence you see in Iraq is being carried out by ruthless killers who are converging on Iraq to fight the advance of peace and freedom. Our military reports that we have killed or captured hundreds of foreign fighters in Iraq who have come from Saudi Arabia and Syria, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and others” (“President Addresses Nation,” 2005). Although reports have rightly questioned whether U.S. officials have exaggerated the role of foreign fighters (e.g., Ricks, 2006), understanding the factors that lead foreigners to join terrorist and insurgent movements around the world is an important research topic.

Foreign fighters, for example, played a significant role in opposing the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and in the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s. Indeed, many of the leaders and most notorious members of the jihadist movement today were drawn from these causes, including Osama bin Laden.

This appendix is the first attempt to statistically model the origins of foreign fighters in Iraq. Specifically it presents results of negative binomial regression models estimated at the country level in which the dependent variable is the number of foreign fighters originating from various countries who were captured in Iraq according to the Multi-National Force–Iraq. The main findings are that countries with large Muslim populations, close proximity to Baghdad, a low level of civil liberties or political rights, and low infant mortality rates are likely to have more of their citizens join the Iraqi insurgency. A country’s literacy rate, GDP per capita, and membership in the multinational coalition are unrelated to the number of foreign fighters from that country captured in Iraq.

Although the model accurately predicts the number of captured insurgents for most countries, it predicts that a larger number of Saudis and a smaller number of Sudanese would have been apprehended than was reported to have been the case. Tabulations from public opinion polls in predominantly Muslim countries, presented in the first lecture, also support the view that education and income are not consistently related to support for the Iraqi insurgency at the individual level (see Figures 1.3 and 1.4).

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