Comment by reissbaker

1 year ago

That's not what the article says at all. It says 45% of the foreign fighters hailed from Africa and the Middle East. The foreign fighters numbered ~42k total. It's unknown how many total fighters ISIS had, but estimates range into 200k total, which would imply that the vast majority of ISIS was native; more conservative estimates are that half of the fighters were "foreign fighters," which would mean that ~75% of the fighters were MENA-native (since the foreign fighters were about half MENA-native). [1] The strongest claim you could make regarding European contributions is that ISIS was around 16% European, including fighters from Chechnya. (The weakest country-of-origin claim is it was about 7% European including Chechnya, although given that Chechen ISIS fighters nearly outnumbered all other European ISIS fighters combined — and that Chechnya is a majority-Sunni-Muslim semi-autonomous region of Russia, and ISIS was attempting to form a Sunni Muslim caliphate — I think the least-European claim might point out that trying to bundle that into a pan-European identity group is probably mistaken, and the most-accurate depiction is "ISIS was a bunch of radicalized Sunni Muslims, mostly from the Middle East and North Africa.")

TL;DR: ISIS was not "a bunch of European guys who got radicalized." It was mostly people from the Middle East and North Africa: somewhere between 75-93%. 95% MENA is probably not correct either, but it's much closer to correct than your original claim.