With the announcement of some limited US acceptance of “vetted” refugees into the country, the hysteria surrounding the putative threat of ISIS sneaking fighters into the country as refugees is growing once again, with Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson the latest to rail at the idea of letting them into the United States.
Yet advocate groups note that the claims are based on faulty assumptions about the nature of the refugees and the vetting process, and that the issue is “overblown” based on the facts. The majority of the refugees are actually children, and among adults women are overrepresented.
Still, it’s not hard to see how this hysteria got started, with officials like US spy chief James Clapper claiming he was deeply concerned about the refugees “descending on Europe” and the publicity from an absurd claim by a Lebanese official that 2% of refugees are secretly ISIS.
Being a refugee is hard, even for those who manage to get accepted into a Western nation. It’s been a huge challenge, and many don’t survive the voyage. Hiding in plain sight as refugees would be a herculean task for ISIS fighters, particularly with so many opportunities to be caught in vetting, stranded in a camp, or simply die along the way.
It also misses what intelligence communities around the world have been saying for years were the real danger of ISIS, that many of their fighters are from Western countries in the first place and have Western passports. They don’t need to “sneak” into Western Europe or the US, and have much easier ways to get here than a refugee trek.
Indeed, with all the efforts to get Western recruits to Turkey and across the border into the ISIS caliphate, it’s fair to say that the jihadists are much more worried with sneaking people out of the US than in sneaking them in.
The majority of the refugees/migrant are men, not children:
UNHCR website : http://data.unhcr.org/mediterranean/regional.php
Of the 442,421 arrivals by sea (current inflows, August-September 2015, (more have meanwhile arrived by land)
Children: 18%
Women: 13%
Men: 69%
The fact that most of these people are men, mostly young, is not surprising: the trip is so perilous that few women with young children would dare to attempt it.
The reason why the pictures in the press so frequently show women and children is also obvious: they are the more vulnerable, and therefore the best suited to elicit pity.
I see no reason to assume that extremists would not be part of these groups: they too can have reasons to flee – whether with the specific intent to form Daesh sleeper cells, or not, is hardly the point.
After all, even ordinary Europeans who had no previous intentions to kill their fellow humans have been attracted to Daesh.
In any case, since hardly anyone is checking these people, let alone register them at entry points, there is no way to tell, one way or the other.
It has indeed struck me by watching these throngs of refugees on TV that especially young men are comprising the majority and I have been wondering why these young men have not taken up arms to join the fight against ISIS (Deash)
A possible explanation could be they don't want to take up arms against IS or any of the other islamists factions, if not because they sympathize with these groups it may be because they don't want to lend any (de facto) support to the regime. Similar to the dilemma the EU and US finds itself in and also would like to run away from the whole mess if that were an option.
The majority of the refugees/migrant are men, not children:
UNHCR website : http://data.unhcr.org/mediterranean/regional.php
Under “Demographics”:
Of the 442,421 arrivals by sea (current inflows, August-September 2015, (more have meanwhile arrived by land)
•Children: 18%
•Women: 13%
•Men: 69%
The fact that most of these people are men, mostly young, is not surprising: the trip is so perilous that few women with young children would dare attempt it.
The reason why the pictures in the press so frequently show women and children is also obvious: they are the more vulnerable, and therefore the best suited to elicit pity.
Whatever the truth about Daesh threat, there is the obvious threat posed by the incapacity to help so many people integrate properly into local European society, house and take care of them, find them jobs… Even if the enormous amounts of money needed to provide them with social benefits, money alone is not enough for people to settle down properly, let alone fit in. The large numbers will also not promote a desire to integrate, but will, on the contrary, encourage “communautarinism” and therefore also sectarism as a means of self- and mutual protection.
Centcom seems to be not the only party having a strong dislike of bad news about IS it seems. Advocate groups don't like it either.
A dutch journalist found no trouble at all to have a false Syrian passport made for the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte. For 700 euros he became a Syrian refugee by the name of Malek Ramadan. IS fighters might find it even more easy.
By they way by far most refugees are young men in the category 18 to 29 years old. Women and children appear most in press reports and images. There they appear to be the majority admittedly. More photogenic perhaps.
Recent figures in Germany 80 % of the asylum seekers are muslim according to the German muslim organization Zentralrat der Muslime. Of the almost half a million refugees who entered the EU by sea in 2015, 72% are male, 13% female and 15% children, according to the UN Refugee Agency
And everything is going swimmingly on the recruitment front. IS in Syria is especially a favorite destination for young women. In fact increasingly so.
These three photos of refugees speak for themselves: http://fr.sputniknews.com/international/20150918/… : 50 men, 5 women, 1 child http://fr.sputniknews.com/international/20150908/… : 50 men, no woman or child http://fr.sputniknews.com/international/20150905/… : several hundreds, a few women.