Today's Wild Geese: Foreign Fighters in the GWOT

[Rex Brynen]

It seems to me that Scheuer is really stretching to make his supposed point here.

Several of the prisoner releases that he cites are overwhelmingly criminal, not political, prisoners. In these cases, most were nearing the end of their sentences, and their release (to mark religious and national holidays) has come to be as much an expected part of the judicial and incarceration system as is parole in the US.

Second, Arab regimes are--precisely because of blowback from the Afghan experience--fully aware of the dangers of militants traveling out of country to receive "work experience" in a foreign insurgency. It stretches credulity to expect that most would today see this as an effective strategy for limiting domestic national security challenges given their knowledge that most of those chickens come home to roost.

Third, some of those prisoner releases have to be seen in the context of successful deradicalization efforts by Arab governments. In Algeria, for example, national reconciliation efforts have reduced the militant Islamist movement to a tiny, tiny fraction of what it was during the height of the post-1991 civil war (a conflict that claimed well over 100,000 lives). Egypt and Saudi Arabia have also experienced some substantial deradicalization successes, in part because of their manipulation of selective inducements such as early release.

Certainly there are recent cases of released prisoners going on to cause mayhem elsewhere (Shakir al-'Absi of Fateh al-Islam comes to mind), and there is particular grounds for concern regarding Yemen's detention-and-release (or escape) policies.

However, I suspect that a look at the background of captured foreign jihadists in Iraq in particular would show that very, very few of them had been imprisoned Islamists given early release in their native countries. On the contrary--and rather more alarmingly--a significant proportion were rather latent Islamists mobilized into action by US intervention in Iraq.

[Ron Humphrey]

Several of the prisoner releases that he cites are overwhelmingly criminal, not political, prisoners. In these cases, most were nearing the end of their sentences, and their release (to mark religious and national holidays) has come to be as much an expected part of the judicial and incarceration system as is parole in the US..

This one I can agree with you on

Second, Arab regimes are--precisely because of blowback from the Afghan experience--fully aware of the dangers of militants traveling out of country to receive "work experience" in a foreign insurgency. It stretches credulity to expect that most would today see this as an effective strategy for limiting domestic national security challenges given their knowledge that most of those chickens come home to roost..

The thing about that is how often those in power don't actually care to look so far as the roosting since their expectation is for it not to happen until after their gone. I will accept however that some of those whose leadership seem to never () be gone may tend to look at it more long term.

[Van]

Someone in the Arab world read their history carefully, and is undoubtedly laughing his rear end off at the symmetry of the situation.

One piece of driving force of the Crusades was "What the heck do we do with all these uppity younger sons?"

Now, I know that this is only one piece, usually ignored under the religious, political, and economic issues, but it was a piece of the European motivation. Looks like the Islamic violent fundamentalist extremist terrorist criminal elements (or whatever Dept. of State wants us to call them this week) jumped on this population control technique.