Wanted - A historical perspective on volunteering for war abroad

The fighter, drawn by ideology, righteousness and perhaps curiosity about violence, arranges transport to the epicenter of conflict. He or his group leader gets in touch with local fixers, who bring them further in from regional staging areas, crossing the border with the benefit of local knowledge.

By now, almost 15 years after the beginning of the war on terror, the dynamics of how volunteers and arms make their way from all over the world to armed paramilitary and terror groups ought to be well known. It can be quite a market - Mujahideen moved into Chechnya in the 1990s insurgency, and now Chechen fighters are making themselves felt abroad.

The Islamic State group has been the most recent target of this hand-wringing. The chief worry that is captivating media would be efforts to keep youth from travelling to the Middle East to join this group. This has been largely justified by a two-pronged approach: first, howling that returned militants may be a threat, and second a vague idea of weakening the IS by depriving them of warm bodies and the symbolic participation of international members.

Surprisingly, I've found quite little in mainstream media of historical comparisons between IS and other similar operations in the past. To Europeans, the most direct comparison of youth flooding to a nation to serve in conflict would likely be the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.

For example, the issue of "returning fighters" was also grappled with as they began to be disbanded under international mediation, and after some diehards left only as the war wound up. In particular, the UK was concerned of IRA-linked Irish fighters that might possibly contribute to the low-level conflict in Northern Ireland. Quite some returning fighters indeed remained involved in British socialist politics, some with personal plans for armed revolution. In the United States, veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, while allowed to return, were viewed as security risks.

Nearer to our time, leaving aside the obvious comparisons to other Islamic terror groups, some sort of comparison could be made with international terrorism and mercenary work of the 1980s. I am a bit pressed to think of any parallels in the past - perhaps the Crusades, or medical volunteering in the Victorian wars such as Crimea.

The greatest change from then seems to me to be modern communications technology that allows interested candidates to self-organize. (Whether the internet is any more effective than the underground socialist newspapers of old though is something worth considering.)

Certainly there will be constants. The arms are probably more important than the men - no matter how motivated, going abroad to a new locale to fight will require acclimatizing yourself to a new set of conditions. One common approach to solving this issue I would look out for would be an acclimatization period in rear areas of the front, or simply putting international fighters together in a composite unit much like IS has done.

A worthy sociological comparison could be made with the modern trend of "voluntourism", with first world youth heading to impoverished areas of Africa to volunteer. On the face of it these activities may seem to attract opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, but there certainly are similarities - interest in seeing the world, poor information on the complexities of their destination (for some), the importance of a foreign face to the destination region...