Over the past decade, research on foreign fighters in the jihadi movement has become ubiquitous. This is due to the unprecedented mobilization of individuals to fight in Syria alongside the Islamic State, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch,43 and other smaller jihadi groups. The mobilization to Syria was four times larger than the number of foreign fighters who joined the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. Although there was little scholarship on jihadism, let alone Muslim foreign fighters, in the aftermath of the Afghanistan war, in 1992, Middle East scholar Martin Kramer identified the potential fallout of foreign fighters returning home: “The Arab volunteers began to return home, where they became involved in violent opposition to their own governments.”44 In particular, Kramer notes the cases of the Algerian civil war and the terrorism campaign in Egypt.45 Despite this prescient work on Muslims who travel to fight in foreign conflicts, a phenomenon we have continued to see in the decades since, Daniel Byman’s newest book Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the Armies of Jihad is the first comprehensive study that provides a sweeping history of this phenomenon from its infancy in Afghanistan in the 1980s through the most recent call to fight in Syria.
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