Reading Kamienski's book you get the impression modern jihadi fighters are a distorted echo of a kind of beserker. Out of their minds on Captagon, hash, coke and red bull, they fight chaotically, savagely, unpredictability and fearlessly.
He describes ISIS as 'junkie jihadis', who become utterly insensitive to pain. Screaming Koranic verses and drugged up beyond comprehension, they suffer five times the casualty rate of the more professional Hezbollah soldiers.
In 2004, Marines fighting in the second battle of Fallujah realised the insurgents weren't responding to being shot. They again seemed impervious to the pain. The Marines resorted to head shots. They discovered meth, coke and piles of needles in the houses afterwards.
More bizarrely, the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists who attacked Mumbai in 2008 not only used steroids and coke, but autopsies confirmed they were high on LSD, which is unusual. LSD has been extensively tested by both European and American militaries as a combat enhancer
and was found to be terrible. So to find it in the bodies of the Mumbai terrorists was unexpected. Kamienski speculates that the combination of drugs together produced a "wild hallucinogenic frenzy".
Overall the Middle Eastern ISIS fighters used more drugs than the average Sunni insurgent, but they are small fry compared to the irregular militias of Uganda, Liberia and Sierra Leone which I have covered in previous threads.
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