A Look At Those Who Want To Fight For The Islamic State

Islam Yaken, the "Hipster Jihadi." INSTAGRAM/I_YAKEN

The Three Types of People Who Fight for ISIS -- Graeme Wood, New Republic

A breakdown of the most evil group on the planet

In February 2012, a young, beefy Egyptian named Islam Yaken took a shirtless selfie and posted it on a Facebook competitor called vk.com. The picture wouldn’t have attracted attention outside his circle of friends, were it not for the photos of himself he tweeted two years later. In that time, the Wahlberg wannabe with tidy, cropped hair had transmogrified into a bushy-haired hipster with heavy-rimmed glasses--who had gone to fight for ISIS. The jihadi accessories in his new photos included a Kalashnikov, a sword, and a bucket of Shia heads.

When Yaken’s pictures went viral a month ago, they provoked confusion about how this well-educated, urban gym-rat could so rapidly embrace a group known for its austere, backward-looking form of desert Islam. The same confusion reigns over the transformation of Abdel-Majed Abdel-Bary, the former stoner who rapped in London under the name “L Jinny”1 and is now a suspect in the murder of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. There is, of course, an obvious continuity between the Yaken who yanked his towel well below the pube-line to give a full glimpse of his abs and the narcissistic poseur now in Syria, as well as a thread of miscreance that runs through the life of Abdel-Bary.

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My Comment:  The "psychopaths" usually do not last long .... but the other two groups are the long term problem and headache for Iraq. Convincing those who are secular and/or Arab chiefs to not support The Islamic State will involve doing a lot of work on the ground level, bribes, promises, and accommodations.