A college dropout from Florida. A nurse’s aide from Denver. The owner of a pizza-and-wings joint from upstate New York.
Except for their embrace of Islam, there’s no common profile for the 100-plus Americans who have traveled to Syria to join Islamic fighters or are accused of supporting them from the United States.
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What motivates Americans to become jihadis?
A look at five Americans who became jihadis, and what motivated them to fight:
• Moner Mohammad Abusalha, who liked to cuddle cats, blew himself up in May in Syria. He was the first American suicide bomber in that civil war.
Abusalha, 22, was a community college student who grew up playing basketball in Vero Beach, Florida. But Abusalha, the son of a Palestinian father and Italian-American mother, became increasingly consumed with religious fervor.
He said he was influenced by a close, radical friend, according to a video he made before he killed himself and 16 others while fighting with Nusra Front, al-Qaida’s branch in Syria.
Both decided that jihad was for them, but when it was time to go, the friend backed out.
Before getting to Syria, Abusalha was in Istanbul, Turkey. He describes his time there as a low point. In the video, he says he saw a cat outside a Turkish mosque. “I see this beautiful cat and I start playing with the cat. … Even though I’m sad, I still feel happy. I see this cat and I feel happy.”
• Shannon Maureen Conley, 19, a nurse’s aide from suburban Denver, was arrested in April as she boarded a flight at Denver International Airport. It was to be the first leg of a journey to Syria, where she wanted to fight with jihadis. She believed it as her only answer to correcting what she saw were wrongs perpetrated against the Muslim world.
The Muslim convert told FBI agents that she wanted to marry an online suitor from Tunisia who said he was fighting with the extremists. She wanted to use her American military training from the U.S. Army Explorers to fight or be a nurse at the man’s camp.
FBI agents became aware of Conley’s growing interest in extremism in November 2013 after she started talking about terrorism with employees of a suburban Denver church. They had seen her wandering around and taking notes on the layout of the campus, according to court documents.
Her lawyer, Robert Pepin, said she was misled while exploring her faith.
Conley pleaded guilty this month to one count of conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. She is to be sentenced in January.
• Mufid Elfgeeh, a 30-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen in Rochester, New York, was arrested in May after he bought two handguns and a pair of silencers that federal officials said he planned to use to kill U.S. veterans of Iraq fighting and Shiites living in the Rochester area.
On Thursday, Elfgeeh, a Sunni Muslim who was born in Yemen, pleaded innocent to new federal charges that he tried to aid the Islamic State group. Court papers say the food mart owner tried to arrange for three individuals to travel to Syria to join Islamic State fighters.
He said he was thinking about doing something in New York to avenge the U.S. “killing machine.”
Elfgeeh told an FBI informant in December 2013: “I’m thinking … just go buy a big automatic gun from off the street or something and a lot of bullets and just put on a (bulletproof) vest or whatever and just go around and start shooting.”
• Troy Kastigar, 28, went first, leaving Minneapolis in November 2008. He had become friends with another man who was getting ready to join the al-Shabab terrorist group in Somalia. A year later he was killed there while fighting the terror group al-Shabab.
“If you guys only knew how much fun we have over here – this is the real Disneyland,” Kastigar said in a 40-minute video released by al-Shabab that also showed his shrouded corpse.
∫ His basketball buddy, Douglas McAuthur McCain, 33, of suburban Minneapolis followed him into the terrorism fight, ending up in Turkey, a frequent entry point to Syria. He was killed this year in Syria fighting with the Islamic State group.
McCain, who last lived in San Diego, once said in a Twitter feed that embracing Islam was the best thing he’d ever done.
– The Associated Press
Their reasons for joining an extremist cause a half-world away are as varied as their geography and life stories.
Some seek adventure and camaraderie. Others feel a call to fight perceived injustice.
But a common strain of disaffection, a search for meaning, seems to emerge, at times stronger than any motivation tied to religious devotion.
“What unifies all these folks is a desire to be recognized, a desire to find a cause that they can mold their life to,” says Evan Kohlmann, who tracks terrorists with Flashpoint Global Partners.
Foreign fighters from dozens of nations are pouring into the Middle East to join the Islamic State group and other terrorist organizations.
U.S. officials are putting new energy into trying to understand what radicalizes people far removed from the fight, and into trying to prod countries to do a better job of keeping them from joining up.
On Wednesday, President Obama will lead a meeting of the 15-member U.N. Security Council as part of the effort to stem the flow of foreign nationals. Next month, the White House will hold a conference on the radicalization of Americans.
It’s an increasingly urgent matter now that the United States and allies are directly attacking Islamic State fighters. There are concerns of blowback that encourages more terrorism at home.
‘LONE-WOLF ATTACKS’
Just recently, a post on a top jihadi forum urged American Muslims who can’t reach the battlefront to wage “an aggressive and sustained campaign of lone-wolf attacks” locally, according to the SITE Intelligence Group. As well, there are worries that fighters with U.S. passports will return home to carry out attacks in America or with airplanes headed to the United States.
The transition from everyday American to foreign fighter for a group that trumpets the beheading of its enemies may start with concern that fellow Muslims are being killed abroad. It often includes Internet chatrooms and online conversations with extremists. It may involve knowing someone who’s radicalized. Many cite the teachings of radical U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011 but whose words are still influential in cyberspace.
Moner Mohammad Abusalha, 22, who grew up playing basketball in Vero Beach, Florida, described his journey to jihadism in a video before he killed himself and 16 others in a suicide bombing in Syria last May. He mentioned both the teachings of al-Awlaki and the influence of friend.
The college dropout, whose father was Palestinian and mother was Italian-American, said of his life as a Muslim in America: “This never was a place for me. … I was always sad and depressed. Life sucked.”
“I want to rest in the afterlife, in heaven,” he said. “Heaven is better.”
Shannon Conley, 19, a nurse’s aide from suburban Denver, wanted to marry an Islamic extremist fighter she met online and thought she could use her U.S. military training to fight a holy war overseas.
In pursuing her Muslim faith, “she was exposed to teachings through which she was terribly misled,” her lawyer, Robert Pepin, wrote in a court filing. Conley pleaded guilty to trying to help Islamic militants and is awaiting sentencing.
In the most recent case, 30-year-old Mufid Elfgeeh, a pizza and food mart owner from Rochester, New York, was indicted for trying to help three people travel to Syria to join extremist fighters.
A naturalized citizen from Yemen, Elfgeeh was arrested this year for buying guns as part of a plan to kill U.S. service members. Elfgeeh has pleaded innocent.
A LOST GENERATION
While the ranks of foreign fighters from America include both naturalized citizens and the native-born, Kamran Bokhari of Stratfor global intelligence said second-generation Muslim Americans trying to balance two cultures could be particularly vulnerable.
“It’s natural for the second generation to be feeling sort of lost and not knowing who they are,” he said. They may feel drawn to the plight of Muslims abroad, and feel guilty about living comfortable lives, he said.
For all the concern about Americans who support Islamic militants, terrorism experts say the problem is much worse in Europe, where Muslims are not as wealthy or assimilated. Several hundred people from Britain have traveled to Syria, according to official estimates, and France and Germany have estimated a combined 1,300 of their citizens have joined the fight.
Aaron Zelin, an expert on jihadi groups at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said roughly half the Americans who have joined the Islamic State group are converts to Islam.
The rest typically are born Muslim or “reverts,” people who were Muslim at birth, but didn’t practice the faith until later in life, he said.
“I would argue that they converted to jihadism, not necessarily mainstream Islam,” he said.
While the Islamic militants’ chief focus remains in Syria, Kohlmann said there is plenty of rhetoric exhorting sympathizers to target Westerners.
“Take these people at their word. Because they mean it.”
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