German Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq: Islamist Jihadist Mobilization, Muslim Radicalization, ISIS, Syrian Civil War, Terrorist Online Recruiting, Salafism, Migrant Integration, Millatu Ibrahim

Professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction, this study examines why approximately 700 German foreign fighters traveled to Syria and Iraq between early 2012 and late 2015. It presents the author's original research on 99 German foreign fighter profiles, examining their preexisting network connections in Germany as well as their biographical availability and integration into German society. The study finds that German foreign fighters are primarily mobilized through traditional social network connections and that the mobilizing network in Germany consists of a nationwide, interconnected, and politically active "Salafist scene." The project also finds that while Western governments often worry about the looming threat of online radicalization, verifiable examples of purely Internet-based radicalization remain rare.
This country-focused effort is designed to divide the difficult work of gathering biographical data on foreign fighters in open unclassified sources. It is also intended to reveal any country-to-country variances in how foreign fighters are mobilized. It is organized in the following way:
Chapter II will gather and analyze information on the jihadist foreign fighters from recently published German academic and government sources. This is intended to present the official and public German understanding of the phenomenon as well as German governmental responses up to mid-2015. The chapter draws heavily from two recently released German security service reports on German residents who have traveled to fight in Syria between 2011 and 2014. The first document contains background data on 378 German fighters known to have departed Germany for Syria by the end of June 2014. It appeared in December 2014.49 The second report, released in June of 2015, focuses on just 60 fighters from Berlin and its surrounding suburbs.50 The reports are published online, but have so far only been partially translated into English. While these German government reports provide a level of detail usually not found in open sources, they are finalized products. They are not searchable and researchers cannot interact with the source data.
Chapter III presents new research on this topic at the micro level. It compiles detailed dossiers on 99 German foreign fighters who have traveled (or attempted to travel) to the current conflict in Syria and Iraq. It then provides analysis of the recruits according to social mobilization and radicalization theories described above. The profiles are based entirely on unclassified and open sources—mostly obtained from German news media reporting.