I will read this article with some interest, as the whole nature of AQ and the phenomenon of "foreign fighters" one of the main areas that our policy and intel types don't get and mischaracterize.

First: AQ is not an Insurgent organization. As a non-state entity AQ has no state and no populace. They are a new breed, a franchiser, a non-state acting like a state to conduct unconventional warfare to incite insurgency in many states, and to borrow members of said insurgencies to contribute to shared ends.

Second as to Syria. This is the route, the pipeline these nationalist insurgents who share ends with AQ travel along and through. Is the pipe the problem or the ends of the pipe? Many branches feed into the main line going through Syria, and most of those branches originate in the lands of our allies. The largest branch begins in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have a long history of diffusing dissidence at home by encouraging the exportation of such dissidents to go to places like Afghanistan in the 80s, and more recently Iraq. We need to overcome our politically driven tendency to focus on largely irrelevant aspects like the pipeline through Syria; and focus on the real issue: The dissatisfied insurgent populaces of the states these men and the money that funds them come from.