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Thread: There seem to have been so many foreign ISIS members in Baghuz area that this was actually a kind of western colony on the Euphrates. Not since the 1960s era of decolonization have so many had to flee as indigenous people take back the land from #ISIScrimes
Foreign members of ISIS were sometimes middle class, many of them participated in the most cruel abuses that ISIS inflicted and they viewed joining ISIS as a kind of colonia-crusade to displace and steal the land of people in Syria and Iraq and genocide locals to replace them.
The war against ISIS has been fundamentally an anti-colonial struggle by people from Iraq and Syria who, galvanized by zeal, decided they will not allow 50,000 people from all over the world to destroy their countries, Though poor, they defeated these ISIS extremists with help
We don't see it through this lens because it would call into question some assumptions about what fueled ISIS and also the religious underpinnings of ISIS and its mentality. Whatever ISIS was when it first emerged it was fundamentally changed by the international supporters
The degree of this can be seen in ISIS signs and the languages on some of them, including English, French, Cyrillic alphabet. The foreigners could have joined the Syrian rebels if their mission was one of helping locals. Joining ISIS was a way to displace and live off locals
The fact that so many foreign members of ISIS have been found in its last enclave shows that these were the die hard core supporters. People in villages around Mosul "supported" ISIS and may still support it, but in a different way and for different reasons #ISIScrimes
People around Mosul, for instance, supported ISIS the way they had previous insurgents and tied support to local issues and abuses by government authorities. People who came from the UK had no such reasons. They came solely to colonize Iraq and Syria with crimes in mind
The foreigners who joined had ample time to leave. They weren't "tricked" and they weren't surprised by ISIS crimes, they came solely to commit those crimes, to enslave and harm and steal. This was purely motivated by ill intentions. #AfterISIS
Many of the foreign volunteers were cowards, which can be seen in how they fled the front lines and preferred to abuse slaves to standing and fighting, they often got locals to fight and die and cook for them, while running from place to place.
The foreign volunteers also seem to have lived off the ISIS welfare state apparatus, such as it existed, preferring to relax on the Euphrates while others fought to the end in Mosul and Raqqa. Then they would beg to surrender at the last moment.
The foreign volunteers always demand mercy, the mercy they did not show anyone else. They always have a ready-made excuse list, they never show sympathy and they never show any real interest in local areas they lived in. They were profoundly colonial in outlook at locals
As I understand it some of the foreigners didn't even learn Arabic, they didn't even bother to learn the language of the landscape. For them this was like a kind of sick twisted tourism package, like boarding an ISIS-cruise ship, now the ship sank, they want to go home.
