Foreign Fighters Playbook

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Foreign Fighters Playbook

What the Texas Revolution and the Spanish Civil War

Reveal About al QaedaByDavid Malet

April 8, 2014 en http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141107/david-malet/foreign-

fighters-playbook

To many observers, the estimated 11,000 foreign fighters who have poured

into Syria during its civil war are worrying signs of a growing trend toward

transnational conflicts. And, in one sense, they are right. Since 2001, as

many as 20,000 outside insurgents, mostly jihadis, have moved into war

zones from Afghanistan to Iraq and Nigeria either to join local rebel groups

or to establish footholds for al Qaeda and other Islamist organizations. In

the last decade, governments have spent hundreds of billions of dollars

attempting to contain the roaming combatants, and hundreds of millions

more trying to reintegrate them back into their home countries.

In another sense, however, observers are wrong. Foreign fighters might

seem to be characteristic of twenty-first-century warfare, but, in fact, they

are nothing new. Over the past two centuries, more than 70 insurgencies

have successfully gone transnational; there have been foreign fighters in at

least one in five modern civil wars. The list includes Lord Byron and his

London Philhellenic Committee, which aided the Greeks in their war for

independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s, the ragtag volunteers

who joined Sam Houstons army in the 1836 Texas War of Independence,

the Communist Internationaldirected coalition of leftists supporting the

Republican faction and the Irish Catholic anticommunists who backed the

nationalists in the Spanish Civil War in 193639, and Jewish paramilitary

groups who battled in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence.
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As in decades past, foreign fighters have been involved in more recent

conflicts around the world. Everyone knows about their presence in the

Middle East, but there are others. In the late 1990s, 200 Albanian-

Americans fought alongside the Kosovo Liberation Army. A few years

later, members of the Irish Republican Army fled Colombia after they were

arrested on charges of training rebels in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of

Colombia (FARC). And today, several thousand foreign combatants,

constituting what the United Nations has termed an insurgent diaspora,

are spread across the African Great Lakes region, some tied to the Lords

Resistance Army, others from Rwandan rebel groups.

Although transnational insurgencies comprise highly diverse groups across

different conflicts and eras, they still have much in common. For one, such

forces are winning: transnational insurgencies have won nearly half of the

civil wars in which they have fought, almost twice the success rate of

insurgencies overall. Several Israeli prime ministers have acknowledged

that Israels victory in 1948 relied on the World War II veterans who aided

the fledgling state against Arab armies. In other conflicts throughout

history, prominent foreign fighters were either instrumental in extending

insurgencies or making them costlier to suppress: the Marquis de Lafayette,

the French general who fought for the American rebels during the

Revolutionary War; the Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi, who supported

the Republican uprising in Brazil in the 1830s; and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,

who formed al Qaeda in Iraq under the U.S. occupation. The patterns of

recruitment for such disparate fighters are broadly similar and, because of

that, they all have the same Achilles heel.

Over the past two centuries, more than 70 insurgencies have successfully

gone transnational; there have been foreign fighters in at least one in five

modern civil wars.


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RECRUITMENT DRIVE

Insurgent groups, from the Texian Army in 1836 to al Qaeda affiliates in

Syria today, use despair rather than optimism to recruit members.Generally, they tell recruits that they are losing a war of survival and that

they face an existential threat. It might not seem like the most persuasive

pitch, particularly for fighters who, if they join, must violate a number of

laws and take up arms in an unfamiliar territory. But it works. Such groups

can convince a recruit that he or she is part of an endangered community

and is obliged to defend it. The strategy works best with foreign recruits

who share the movements ideology, ethnicity, or religion but who, unlike

local fighters, do not have immediate communities and families in the line

of fire.

But recruiters can also add volunteers who are only loosely affiliated with,

or are merely sympathetic to, a certain group. Such fighters are often

persuadable because of their weak affiliations with their own country and

national identity, especially in the case of unassimilated immigrants or the

politically repressed or economically marginalized. Many transnational

insurgencies have typically preferred to bring these more pliable foreign

foot soldiers on whenever possible, rather than risk their own regular

members on the battlefield. This strategy appears to work well in

ideological conflicts, but it is more difficult for ethnic rebel groups tosustain. In fact, even the most successful ethno-nationalist insurgencies

have tended not to use foreign fighters. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and

the Kurdistan Workers Party in Turkey were successful at raising foreign

financial support, but they apparently did not aim for more than that. They

imported guns, not sons, perhaps because they could never make a credible

claim that their struggle represented enough of an existential threat to rouse

members of their far-flung diaspora to come and join them.


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In cases where foreign fighters have successfully been recruited on such

grounds, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, the propaganda produces its own

problems. In these conflicts, the foreign fighters, driven by the belief that

they are fighting a desperate battle to the end, act more aggressively than

local insurgents -- even when their side is actually winning. Its no accident

that most suicide missions in Afghanistan and Iraq were carried out by

foreign fighters rather than local militants. Fighting for what is often an

abstract ideal, without having to worry about direct retaliation against their

families, the foreign fighters need not show mercy. Some insurgent groups,

such as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and Jabhat al-Nusra in

Syria, have taken advantage of this dynamic by using foreigners to target

civilians when the local combatants will not.

Differences between foreign and local insurgents can sow discord among

them. The past decade has provided ample evidence that employing foreign

fighters offers as many drawbacks as benefits. In Iraq, the spike in sectarian

violence perpetrated by al Qaedalinked, foreign-dominated militants led

local Sunni insurgents to turn against them and band together in the so-

called Awakening movement, on the side of coalition forces. In

Afghanistan, a group of locals in the town of Gizab, who were intent on

driving the Taliban from their province, allied with U.S. soldiers, who

called them the Good Guys of Gizab. In Somalias civil war, the

indigenous Somali leadership of the Islamist group al Shabaab turned

against the Western jihadis in the group for purportedly failing to champion

local rebel interests, favoring instead the most aggressive views of al

Qaeda. Most recently, in Syria, ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra have devoted at

least as much energy to battling local rebels of the Free Syrian Army -- and

each other -- as they have the regime of Bashar al-Assad.


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Loyalty is another problem. Although some foreign recruits remain loyal to

their cause their whole lives, inevitable stories of disaffected fighters can

make it difficult for insurgent leaders to retain their core supporters. Often,

after an early spike of interest, the tide of volunteers in a transnational

insurgency ebbs with reports of low morale and ungrateful civilians. It

often surges again after major battles, or outright victory, when those not

committed enough to risk their lives finally arrive to try to claim some of

the victory. In 1980s Afghanistan, for example, Osama bin Laden never

had more than a couple hundred volunteers to fight the Soviet Union, but

their ranks swelled by more than 10,000 once the Red Army had

withdrawn.

Historically, most foreign fighters have not stayed around even in cases in

which ethnic or national groups won hard-fought sovereignty, such as the

Texas Revolution, in which some Mexicans and European immigrants

enlisted in the Texian Army. And when former combatants have returned

home, intelligence services have usually kept a close watch on them. In the

Spanish Civil War, veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade -- the name

given to the nearly 3,000 U.S. volunteers who fought for the Republican

side -- were among the only Americans with combat experience when

World War II began. But they were barred from joining the U.S. military.

Yet, for the most part, foreign fighters were granted amnesty by their own

governments. The vast majority of them went on to lead essentially

ordinary lives, even if they remained active in radical politics or sectarian

or diaspora communities.

NO HOMECOMING

It became harder for foreign fighters to return to their homes about 25 years

ago, when the Arab mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation of


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Afghanistan formed al Qaeda. Although the fighters felt confident that they

had defeated the Red Army and hastened the collapse of a superpower, they

knew that their Arab governments, which viewed them as domestic threats,

would not allow them to move back. As a result, they became stateless and

truly transnational, using their networks to move into conflict zones from

Bosnia to the Philippines. They made their appeals global as well, speaking

of a worldwide Muslim community engaged in a fight for its survival

against Western-led domination. They succeeded in framing every

subsequent conflict that they joined as a single front in this greater war.

Syria has changed that jihadi narrative somewhat, from the established line

of defending Muslims against Western powers to one of saving fellow

Sunnis from Assads Alawite regime, which is supported by Shiite

Hezbollah and Iran. The foreign fighters who joined the fray in Damascus

about a year after the uprising began had prior experience with waging this

kind of sectarian conflict in Iraq; they immediately introduced brutal

tactics, including suicide bombings and beheadings. In response, as many

as 5,000 Hezbollah fighters, along with other foreign Shiite militants, have

taken up arms in support of the Syrian army.

Insurgent groups, from the Texian Army in 1836 to al Qaeda affiliates in

Syria today, use despair rather than optimism to recruit members.

Since Syria is precisely the type of ungoverned territory that attracts

foreign fighters, and because so few of the Sunni combatants there would

be welcomed back by their own governments if they left the battlefield,

most have little incentive to give up and leave. To understand what could

come next in Syria, the past seems to be the best predictor of the future,

since transnational militant groups self-consciously emulate each other.

Unlikely as it may seem, the transnational insurgents in the 1836 Texas


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Revolution, the 193639 Spanish Civil War, and the 1948 Israeli War of

Independence inspired the development of the mujahideen in 1980s

Afghanistan, from which the jihadi groups of the 2010s directly descend.

The international community has rarely ever supported foreign fighters,

since they threaten individual states sovereignty and the authority o f

citizenship and national military service. States engaged in formal peace

settlements have made expelling foreign fighters a precondition for talks,

such as in Spain in the 1930s and Bosnia and Pakistan in the 1990s. But

with the emergence of al Qaeda and its latest incarnation in Syria, foreign

fighters are less likely to be state-sponsored than they have been in the past

-- and thus are more difficult to remove by negotiations.

Any other international efforts to block the flow of new foreign fighters

into Syria are likely to be both futile and counterproductive. Borders cannot

be sealed and the movement of weapons cannot be controlled in a country

where different groups -- the government, the Free Syrian Army, hard-line

Islamists, and Kurdish rebels -- claim control over different border

crossings and parts of the country. Likewise, deterring militants from

returning to their home countries when the fighting is over would be a

strategic error. Governments are right to worry about radicalization, but

militants who return home are also likely to bring with them tales of

disillusionment that could effectively blunt recruitment programs. As withthe Syrian quagmire itself, the best response for governments of countries

whose citizens have gone to fight there is watchful containment. Like

previous foreign fighters before them, those volunteers in Syria are there to

wage what they see as a defensive war. So employing the lessons of the

past, most of all by trying to reduce the perception that a specific ethnic or

sectarian group is directly under threat, may be the best way to break the

cycle of recruitment.


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Foreign Fighters Playbook