Foreign Fighters in War

foreign fighters who went to ukraine certainly uh do very much so of their own free will nobody is telling them to go and in actual fact the majority of people who went there they have one thing in common is that their friends family peers including often ex-military peers i said you are effing crazy you are nuts are you mad quite often actually questioning their mental health not just their judgment and saying, look, what's this really about? Most people coming in as foreign fighters from outside don't have great life expectancy, as we see fatality rates as high as 30% in a lot of these cases. How is it that people are persuaded to do this incredibly risky thing where they're fighting for a side that usually loses with rebel groups, that can't guarantee to pay them? When it does pay them, it's definitely not consistent. And I think there's a huge variation among why individual people become foreign fighters. But one thing that my research showed that was very consistent is that they're essentially guilted into it by recruiters. Welcome to episode 145 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Atwell. Today's episode explores the role of foreign fighters in war. Our guests begin by highlighting the long history of foreign fighters in conflict, from the early United States and the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s to contemporary cases such as the International Legion in Ukraine and the role of foreign fighters in ISIS. The conversation then turns to why individuals risk their lives for others in faraway lands, with motivations ranging from financial incentives and ideological commitments to deeply personal reasons. Finally, the discussion concludes by examining the impact foreign fighters have on the battlefield, with the results often being mixed. Dr. David Mallet is an associate professor at American University whose research focuses on foreign fighter recruitment, insurgency, and transnational conflict dynamics. He is the author of the book Foreign Fighters, Transnational Identity and Civil Conflicts, a comprehensive study of why and how individuals join wars far from home. Colin Freeman is a British journalist and former chief foreign correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph. He has reported extensively from conflict zones around the world, including recently in Ukraine. His book, The Mad and the Brave, the untold story of Ukraine's foreign legion, tells the stories of foreign volunteers who joined Ukraine's defense during the Russo-Ukrainian War. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project at Princeton University and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here is my conversation with David Mallett and Colin Freeman. Colin Freeman and David Mallett couldn't be more excited to have this conversation with you today. Thank you for joining us on the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Hello, Kyle. How are you doing? Hi, Kyle. Glad to be here. I'm going to start with the question of why should we care about foreign fighters? And David, you wrote an academic book on foreign fighters and you studied this phenomenon for, is it years or decades? You've looked at foreign fighters. It's decades. Sometimes it feels like longer at this point. Yeah, I got interested in it really because of issues that were coming up in the mid-2000s when you had the Iraq occupation that wasn't going as smoothly as expected. And so many of the suicide bombers were not Iraqis. They were coming from dozens of other countries, sometimes outside of the region. It just seemed really weird to me that somebody would be a terrorist, not in their own backyard, where it would seem easiest, but a country where they'd never even been before. So I just got interested in questions of how insurgencies recruit people from outside their countries to come join them, why people join. It turned out there hadn't actually been a single systemic look at this before. So the term foreign fighters was in the news And I ended up calling it that. So Colin, you also have written a book about foreign fighters in a specific case in Ukraine. I'll ask you, what got you into this topic? And then also, how do we define what a foreign fighter is and how should we conceptualize them? Well, to take up David's point, I was living in Iraq during the early years of the post-Saddam era. And at the hotel I was staying at, a very cheap hotel, we had U.S. soldiers come in once and scan the register looking for the list of guests. I asked them why they were there, and they said because there were foreign terrorists coming into the country to blow themselves up. So that was right at the beginning of the wave of suicide bombings that started in Iraq in, I think, September of 2003. Yeah, fast forward. I've been a foreign correspondent for the last quarter century. I was covering the war in Ukraine, and at the beginning of that, on around day three, when things looked very dark for Ukraine, President Zelensky issued an appeal asking for foreign fighters to come to the country. I think it was partly an element of show business to it to kind of get the world to realize that Ukraine was very much the underdog in this conflict and to enlist the sympathies of people to show how desperate they were. He wanted mainly qualified foreigners, people from NATO-trained armies to come in, I think probably had in mind Delta Force people, Marines from UK, SAS people. He got a ragtag bunch of all sorts turning up. It certainly captured the imagination of people around the world. Apparently 20,000 people applied in the early days. Whether they all turned up, I don't quite know. But it was a real mix of people. And I thought this is an interesting way of telling the story of the war, not just in terms of getting their battlefield accounts, but exploring their motivations for coming to fight. This is a case of people who were living ordinary civilian lives, usually one day back in America or the UK, and then the next they're going off to fight what looked like World War III. Not a conflict like we've had in Iraq or Afghanistan, either where NATO or the US, the West held all the aces, but one where they would be underdogs. Yeah, a lot of really important, impactful things there. Perhaps the most important one is that you may have been staying at the same hotel due to your lodging decisions that foreign suicide bombers were staying at. How did that make you feel to find that out? It was a bit strange. I mean, I was a freelancer there. I couldn't afford to stay in expensive hotels. It was perhaps one of those instructive examples where you often hear freelancers on very low budget say that this is the real way to see a place and not to stay in the local Sheraton or whatever. And yeah, ironically, the guys who appear to be staying in my hotel were then going and bombing the more expensive hotels up the road in coming months and years. Yeah, and I think they considered probably Yemenis and Syrians and people like that. And I remember thinking at the time, that's weird because we had these people come in the run up to the war. And they'd come to have a go at the US forces then with the connivance of the Iraqi government. And, you know, we figured that the U.S. forces had wiped them out during the invasion. And yet suddenly there were yet more of them turning up. So this question is for both of you. How prominent is the phenomenon of foreign fighters today? And how common has it been across time and space? It's a lot more common than I expected it to be when I started doing research on it back in my PhD days. It turns out that if you look at all the civil wars going back to the Napoleonic Wars, 1815, more than a quarter of them. we can document that insurgent groups had foreign fighters with them. And it's a whole separate question about definitions of who's a foreign fighter versus joining a military force, foreign legion, but just the rebel groups, something like a third of them almost, we can easily observe that they had foreign volunteers. So it's something that's more prevalent. It's sure it's easier to get around with globalization, but you can go find cases like Spain in the 1930s where more people showed up in less than three years, a hundred years ago than showed up in cases like ISIS since then. So motivated travelers have always been around. And if we don't call them foreign fighters, we might think of them in very different ways than we do of, let's say, ISIS foreign fighters or maybe volunteers in Ukraine, right? If they are with a cause that we think is abhorrent or terrifying, like let's say ISIS, they're the most fanatical villains out there in the international system. And if they're fighting for a cause that we support, they're the most noble heroes. And that's always been the case with foreign fighters through modern history. If you go down to the White House or you go to Lafayette, it's where the staff of Andrew Jackson, but the other statues there are Lafayette, Rochambeau. They are volunteers from the American Revolution. You know, they are von Stube and they're Tadeusz Kosciuszko. They're given the highest position of honor, these volunteers from France and Prussia and Poland, because they were seen as so noble for coming and helping the American Revolution. That's certainly not the way we would think of people who were showing up in Iraq in the 2000s from elsewhere. It sounds like it's fairly common. You said, David, at 25% of the war since essentially the last couple hundred years. I'm guessing there's indicators that this has happened all throughout antiquity as well. Yeah, I mean, you can certainly find transnational groups, multinational groups going back to the Crusades period. You can find foreign volunteers, Vikings, basically, who were waiting on the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople. So throughout the Western world, it's common even if we weren't really looking for it. And in Russia, there were, I guess, there were Czech volunteers who were waiting on the czar. And sometimes you see later cases of foreign fighters, they say, I was inspired by this past group. I'm even going to name myself after this historic group. So there's a very much a self-conscious legacy that provides legitimation. A lot of times when these guys are doing things that maybe their government doesn't approve of, they say, hey, it's just like the American Revolution or it's just like the Spanish Civil War. Lay off, I'm a hero like them. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the differences that you notice across time also is if we wind the clock back to the early years of foreign fighters of centuries ago is often they may have been doing it for money and acting in a mercenary capacity. That is something we don't see so much in the modern era, certainly in Ukraine, and very few people there are doing it for the money. And also what we live in a modern world now where people don't really need to do that. Or certainly if you want to earn a living, going and being a, you know, going fighting in a war, especially a war where you're the underdog, is not something that most people go for. You know most ex people in America or the UK in the 21st century if they want to carry on practicing their skills in some way they can earn a very handsome living working for the likes of Blackwater doing static guarding and military consultancy and working in places like Somalia as bodyguards earning a thousand pounds a day it much safer than going and fighting in Ukraine That the other thing that perhaps interested me about the Ukraine war is that you know it generally much more idealistic and altruistic although you do get other motivations for going which is the sense of adventure and what I call sometimes the fight club motivation, which is that sense of, you know, I live in the mollycoddled West with all its safe health and safety culture and there's no real challenges. Can I live up to the challenges that my forefathers went through in World War II or before that? And I think that is a powerful motivator for many of them. Colin brings up an interesting point, which is why do people volunteer to become foreign fighters? David, what does research say about the motivations or the drivers for people to join foreign civil wars and go risk their lives for people that aren't part of their own country? Yeah, it's so complicated. Like Colin's saying, there's always this mix, I think, of nobility and it's more selfish, you know, profit-based motives, just adventure seeking. One thing that got me really interested in this topic to begin with was the fact that so many of them were suicide bombers in the 2000s that they obviously weren't doing it to make money so that you couldn't just call them mercenaries. I mean, you wouldn't think. So they also didn't enjoy the same protections as legal combatants, as members of state military students. As Colin's saying about contractors today, there's a lot of easier ways to do this. You would end up in Guantanamo or elsewhere if you became a foreign fighter in Afghanistan or Iraq. So it became a really interesting question for me. You know, how is it that people are persuaded to do this incredibly risky thing where they're fighting for a side that usually loses with rebel groups that can't guarantee to pay them when it does pay them? It's definitely not consistent, you know, very little when they do pay them. And I think there's a huge variation among why individual people become foreign fighters. But one thing that my research showed that was very consistent is that they're essentially guilted into it by recruiters. They tell them that this conflict that's happening elsewhere in the world, it's not some local civil war. It's part of this global struggle for the survival of your people, whatever that happens to be, whether it's a religious group, an ethnic community, an ideological group. They say that, you know, forget your citizenship. And a lot of times people are somewhat marginalized in the countries they live who become foreign fighters. And they say, your people are under existential threat. They're wiping us out over there. We'll show you some atrocity footage. There's usually very gendered language about women in peril that young men have to come and save. And this is your chance to do something about it. Your government's not doing something about it. It's up to you. And it's also in your self-interest because if we fall over there, they're going to come for you where you live next. So you're better off fighting now. So, you know, the U.S. in the 2000s was saying we need to go to Iraq to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them at home. But that's really what the jihadis were saying, too. And that seems to be a pretty consistent message with foreign fighter recruiters. Even when they're winning, they don't say, hey, it's this great opportunity. Come on, get in while you can. They use this message of the need to stave off defeat, the need to save your people. I think that's certainly true within the sort of jihadist foreign fighter narrative of the kind of people who went to fight in Iraq, for example, or in Syria, that especially if you were recruiting them as potential suicide bombers or as cannon fodder in some fashion, taking on operations against the US military. For example, I remember when I was in Baghdad, you would read coalition press releases about the outcome of battles between US forces and foreign fighters. And it was generally speaking, you know, one US fighter killed for 10 or 20 foreign fighters or no US fighters killed. So the odds in these situations were horrendously against them. And I think in those situations, there's more likely to be a degree of peer pressure, coercion, even brainwashing to some extent, especially with the suicide bombers. Whereas, in contrast, foreign fighters who went to Ukraine certainly do very much so of their own free will. Nobody is telling them to go. And in actual fact, the majority of people who went there, one thing in common is that their friends, family, peers, including often ex-military peers, said, you are effing crazy. You are nuts. Are you mad? Quite often actually questioning their mental health, not just their judgment and saying, look, what's this really about? You're not really considering that. Is there something wrong that you're, you know, is this a way of flagging up something going wrong in your life? Are you suicidal? So yeah, the motivations and the pressures on them are very different depending on which section you look at. So I'm hearing multiple potential reasons. Greed is one of them scholarship might say, which is for money, but we're saying that these are actually like very unfavorable conditions. They have to stay in the same hotel that Colin stays in, which is just atrocious, probably not getting paid. And they might even be having to commit suicide as part of the deal. Ideological alignment can be a sort of big picture motivator. I think, David, that's where you're going. And then at the same time, there's also some very personal reasons at the individual level, escaping personal crisis, a personal sense of like a need for an adrenaline rush. Does that pretty much summarize the two big things is ideological alignment and then also just very individual personal reasons? I think that's right. I think, and Colin shows this in the book with some of the people that he talked to, that you do have people who have served before, who have been in battle, who don't always readjust well and are told, you know, here's a chance to go back out and make a difference like you were doing before. We see that throughout history with some of these cases because the recruiters really typically do want specialists. They want people with combat experience. They want people who don't know how to operate tanks or especially aircraft. Pilots are always paid well as foreign fighters. That's not usually who they get. And they tend to get less choosy over time. So there are some people who do make good money. And I think that's actually one thing that's changing, particularly in Ukraine, is there's a number of people who see this as a chance to, if they're not jihadis, not be hurt by being a foreign fighter, but actually put it on their resume and say, you know, my CV, look, I served here. Now hire me to do security in Somalia or elsewhere. We're seeing some volunteers in Ukraine who actually specifically said, yeah, I went there so I could become a private security contractor later and be more marketable. And so there are these sort of motivations out there. We're seeing some volunteers who fought against ISIS get contracts, either as security contractors or even as NGOs doing development work, saying, well, we have experience in Iraq or Myanmar or places like that, getting American or Canadian government contracts. I think that's one thing that is changing. As long as you're not a jihadi, there actually might be more of a chance to make a profitable career out of having been a foreign fighter. Historically, it was probably not a wise investment. One of the other dominant factors among the people I interview in the book is it's not usually enough just to think this is a good cause. I'm going to go out there and go and fight for Ukraine. There's usually other factors in their life as well that motivate them to go out. It's often sort of an unfulfilled setup back in the UK or the US. They're ex-military and they're bored of civilian life. quite often broken marriages and problems in relationships and a general desire to seek a new sense of purpose in life so that when they come back from Ukraine, if they come back, people see them as somebody who's done something interesting in their life. And then also sometimes redemption for past sins. There's quite a few of the fallen volunteers in Ukraine, people who've had brushes with the law, they have time in prison, and they want to redeem themselves. There's one guy in my book, he spent 18 months in jail for possessing a machine gun, having worked for a drug gang in England. And he said to me, I may well die out there, but if I do, I'd rather I die fighting for a good cause so that people remember me for that than die in a gang fight in the UK. And he basically wanted to wipe the slate clean. And that is something you also see with a lot of the jihadists. Certainly in the UK, where we had something like 800 or 900 people went and fought for ISIS in Syria and Iraq. And there was a high proportion of ex-offenders who I think were told, look, you go to Iraq, Syria, you can wipe the slate clean with God. You can absolve yourself of your past sins. And also it happens that the task they're being asked to do kind of appeals to their particular skill set and their mentality because it involves guns and fighting. Yeah, interesting. So I love this idea. It's not just enough to believe it's a good cause you're going to fight for. There's something else that actually triggers you to move forward. I almost wonder if the way you could frame it is believing it's a good cause is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to have somebody go. I think there's one guy in the book who was an ex-army officer, a highly qualified guy from the UK. And he went, not because he had problems in his home life or anything else, didn't have family, so that helped, I think. But he went because he watched the Ukrainians fighting and while everybody else was watching him on CNN thinking, yeah, look at that. They struck a blow against the Russians. They destroyed that tank. he was looking and saying, look at the way that chap's holding his Kalashnikov, and look at the way that tank is positioned out in the open. And he felt they needed a lot more tactics. But he was a relatively rare outlier as somebody who felt he purely had things to help on. And a lot of people like that actually went out, I think, mainly thinking that they would train people rather than getting involved in combat, although inevitably a lot of them did. Yeah, I had the chance to work kind of project, published an article with a British YPG volunteer, Joshua Farrell Malloy, who's now becoming an academic, getting his PhD. And, you know, he spoke to a lot of his former comrades in arms, and most of them talked about the importance of, you know, seeing ISIS atrocity videos, you know, pilots being burned alive and things like that, which actually, in this case, had the opposite effect of getting people to come volunteer against them. So it was very much seeing this spark that, wow, this is something really bad, something on the human level that requires intervention that, you know, why not me? He also chatted to a few people who had been active online talking about, yeah, I'm going to go fight ISIS and never actually made it. And, you know, to ask them, well, how come you never showed up? And a lot of times it was just simple logistic things. It was nobody got back to them. So they assume that maybe my help isn't really wanted after all, or, you know, they just didn't raise the money or they just thought about it, you know, a second time. So there has to be some sort of additional spark, but there also has to be a lot of facilitation that happens or people just are not going to follow through with it. I think in a lot of cases too. I often thought the best thing, the way the MI6 or the CIA or the Western Security Services could have done to stop ISIS were just to oppose as a bunch of dodgy recruiters online, taking a load of money off people and, you know, invited them out to Turkey and then perhaps got the Turkish Security Services to rough them up for a couple of days. And let stories like that get round afterwards Send a few people back with some bad experiences and you have put people off very quickly I mean in Ukraine by comparison there was very little of that The Ukrainians made it very easy to turn up. Many people had difficulties once they got there in terms of the logistics, but certainly it wasn't hard. It was a budget flight away from the UK. You could be there in a day's flight. That tees up the next part of the conversation, which is, you know, how impactful are foreign fighters on the battlefield, both the negative and the positive? And it really starts with, do local governments or insurgent groups want foreign fighters? Are these proactively sought after across time and space or not really? Yeah, I think that's one of the big debates in the research literature about foreign fighters is do they help? Do they hurt? Are they showing up uninvited? I think it depends on the situation. Most of the time, there is some sort of transnational group, whether it's, you know, an ethnic diaspora community or communists, Islamists, Freemasons, whatever it happens to be in those particular circumstances, who do go out and recruit people. and they have connections to the local group, but it's not purely, let's say, somebody sitting locally on the surgent front line, sending out emails asking people to come join them. It's usually these broader institutions that their target audience is already involved in in their home countries, and that's why they see themselves as being tied to this faraway group. Somebody invites them to show up. Very few people simply show up, some do, uninvited without having been recruited by some organization that has facilitated sending people over, that's told them where to go, helped equip them. That's something that seems to be pretty constant throughout cases, that there is this really established mechanism for getting people over there, for transporting them, for connecting them, for vetting them as well. And once they get there, things are usually not what the recruiters told them they would be. In every single set of circumstances, the local fighters and the foreign fighters end up in conflict with each other. Everything from bar fights up to fire fights. You can document this in every single case. I mean, if I could tell you the things my army recruiter said would happen to me when I joined, you would be shocked at what I believed my life would be like. Yeah, and then part of it is sometimes they're fanatics who are there because this is this global fight they've been promised. And maybe they're really concerned that the locals are not good Muslims and are doing the rituals they're supposed to and aren't wearing their beards properly. Or maybe they're these sort of naive do-gooders who think, wow, everybody here is going to expect me to be this hero and they're going to love me. And it just doesn't happen. and they're treated as a nuisance, who doesn't know the local language or customs. It depends whose research you look at, but the results are very mixed. In some cases, we can show that the foreign fighters made an absolute difference to the outcome. They didn't get the specialists they wanted. Different governments have successfully said we wouldn't have won our war. Israel's an example of this. If not, if we hadn't had these foreign volunteers come in with their specialized knowledge, previous combat experience. In other cases, the argument is made that the foreign fighters were just fanatics were brought in outside agendas, like some of the jihadis, and, you know, really sidetrack things, cause more problems than they solved. This is one of the, I think, the big ongoing debates. And we definitely had the discussion on this podcast about how, you know, very ideological driven foreign fighter, such as in the case of ISIS, sometimes they are so strict as foreigners on what right looks like religiously that they start impeding and then stepping on essentially the local populations and hurting the local populations. And then essentially they're like, get the fuck out of here. But Colin, I'd be curious in the Ukraine case, you know, is Ukraine actively recruiting a foreign legion? And are these fighters who show up from the United States or UK or wherever, are they put into good positions that they thought or are they, do they essentially become more expendable or cannon fodder because they're not local nationals? Well, when Zelensky first announced the international legion, the hope was to get the cream of the ex-military people in the likes of the UK and the US, very experienced people who could act as advisors and, you know, and ex-SAS people, ex-Delta SEALs, an experienced cadre. What he got was a much more varied bunch, but what was not reported at the time was that he had not consulted or informed any of his generals that he was going to do this. And at the time, they had hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians queuing around the block in every major city to join up. And these were people who, A, spoke the language, B, often had an element of military training from national service or whatever, and C, they were fighting for their own country. So the Ukrainian military was saying that we've got enough newcomers as it is. We don't have the capacity to absorb, you know, 20,000 foreigners who are going to be a mixed bag and also, you know, not able to speak Ukrainian or Russian. So, you know, and obviously on a battlefield, the language issue is a real problem. You can't be stuck in a trench under a commander whose commands you can't understand. So when the foreign fighters got there, they didn't find that there was much organization for them. A lot of them languished in barracks for months and weeks on end. Some didn't, but a common experience was like they got there and then it all revved up and then had nowhere to go. And what they often ended up doing was kind of forming small bands of about a dozen or so at a time and basically shopping themselves around on the front lines, bypassing the legions rather sort of chaotic organizational structures because they weren't just getting sent out to the front in the way that they wanted to after a couple of weeks training. and they would team up with somebody who knew somebody else, who knew someone else, who knew a commander in the Ukrainian army and then they would go to them and say, look, can we be of assistance? There's a dozen of us. We only met three weeks ago, but from what I can tell, so-and-so is a Navy SEAL, so-and-so is ex-US Army Staff Sergeant. We're a reasonable bunch of guys. Give us a try. And that, as you can imagine, produced rather mixed results. Sometimes they accorded themselves very well and the Ukrainians were happy to have them there and they said yep you can stay. Occasions you had the Walter Mitty's, the fantasists turning up saying that they were ex-SAS or ex-Delta SEALs, they were nothing of the sort and they came unstuck on the battlefield and word quickly went round among the Ukrainian commanders that these people were a mixed bag and therefore you had to be careful about who you trusted and quite often you did have situations where there were punch-ups between the foreigners and the Ukrainians. And quite often the foreigners began to feel... There's a chapter in the book called Free Meat, which was based on a comment that one of the Ukrainian commanders apparently made in the earshot of one of the volunteers that I interviewed where he described the foreign volunteers thinking that he wasn't being overheard as free meat, the cannon fodder, really, because they were there for their own reasons and they were clearly enthusiastic. He felt he could use them for what he wanted. And obviously that kind of thing did not go down well with the foreigners. But perhaps the biggest thing was the morale boost it gave because for the average Ukrainian in the street, you see foreigners wandering down the road in Ukrainian uniform but with a small patch on their arm denoting that they're from the US or the UK or wherever. There was a tremendous morale boost to feel like there are people here who are not just coming out and dishing out aid and, you know, humanitarian goods in that normal kind of war zone way, but actually coming and putting boots on the ground and fighting and dying alongside us. And the contribution in a way was symbolic as much as everything else. And that was probably quite powerful. U.S., U.K., and Ukraine understand that. Any surprising states of origin for foreign fighters you saw in Ukraine? You'd get a smattering from odd places like India, Korea, parts of Africa sometimes, but those are very much isolated individual cases of people who sort of own idiosyncratic circumstances and somehow brought them there. A lot of people in the ex-Soviet countries, especially in the Baltics, Georgia, places like that, where they felt like, you know, we could be next on Putin's hit list. More recently, a new phenomenon is lots of fighters from Latin America, particularly Colombia, where because of the peace process that's been going on over the last decade, you have large numbers of highly, you know, Western-trained, US-trained men-at-arms who are, you know, over-employed now and who are going there. There is speculation that for some of them it's more a kind of financial thing because if you're fighting actually on the front lines proper in Ukraine, You know, in combat, the combat pay is around $3,000 a month or thereabouts. By Colombian standards, it's not bad money. With them, there's perhaps a bit more of a financial motive. Although, again, I don't think anybody goes to somewhere as dangerous as Ukraine unless their heart is in it to some extent as well. So I actually have a question, Colin. This issue of being treated as cannon fodder is certainly nothing new. And I think it's something that would have hurt recruitment in a lot of cases and can find even some historical cases like the Texas Revolution. So researchers from the early 20th century are saying if only they'd let people go home and tell them what their experience was, that would have killed the flow of recruits. I'm wondering with Ukraine, it's so different unlike places like Spain in the 1930s where they took their passport and censored their mail. I wonder how much social media has to do with this from what you've seen. And the Ukrainians, if they saw somebody who was like they'd be a troublemaker, they're like, just please go now. Social media, I think, is very much a double-edged sword. We've seen this with ISIS too. Just wondering how much of this you saw. Definitely, thanks to social media, we get a much less filtered picture of the war in Ukraine or indeed against ISIS in Syria than we used to in the old days. And I think one of the reasons why we hear of people complaining about being used as cannon fodder or people complaining that a lot of the foreign volunteers are fantasists and nut jobs is because people can do this on social media and quite a few of the foreign volunteers don't help themselves. There are kind of what they call Instagram warriors, Call of Duty warriors, who are constantly online showing themselves on the front line and then somebody else will comment on their social media strand, hey, you know, I'm out there in that spot. You're nowhere near where you say you are. So we do get a much less filtered version of events. And I think that It partly explains the fact that if we look at the Spanish Civil War we do get the sense of this incredibly romantic noble idealistic crusade against fascism You know it where George Orwell is It's where all the poets and the intellectuals are. I think in reality, it probably wasn't quite like that. It was just that because a lot of them, about 80% of them went via their local communist parties, they very much towed the line that this was about a struggle about fascism. And if they were interviewed anywhere, or even if they wrote, you know, writing in private communications, they didn't tend to sort of say, you know, I'm out here having a laugh. The Spanish women are quite hot. And, you know, there's lots of wine drinking to be done and that in my spare time. And I was bored at home. That sort of whole human dimension of the motivations is just cut out. It's all about the purity of the battle against socialism. Very, very little other motivations are mentioned. So, David, we've discussed a lot of advantages and potential. disadvantages of having foreign fighters on your side. Could you just give us a list of, if you are an organization in a civil war, what are the pros and what are the cons from the tactical to strategic level of bringing in foreign fighters on your side? So just considering some of the big historical cases, we've seen that foreign fighters tend to bring in resources that locals don't have. They have these transnational networks funding them. They're oftentimes the best armed, the local of resistance fighters and rebels. Again, there's sort of the two-edged sword of that, that sometimes their funders have other ideas and want them to be doing other things when they're there. That sometimes comes across. But typically they show up with training, with experience, with equipment, with weapons that the locals don't have. They're sometimes seen as sexier, so there's some defection from local fighting units to want to go join the foreign fighters as I was just staying with my local commander from my town. So that can cause some resentment as well when we see that happen in Bosnia and other places like that in recent history. There are higher instances, the research shows us, of violence against civilians, not just murderers, but also sexual violence in cases where insurgencies have foreign fighters. I don't think the research shows it's the foreign fighters doing it, but that's what the data seems to show, that rebel groups that have foreign fighters, you do see higher instances of wartime violence against civilians. Maybe just because they're not as invested in the local community, essentially? Because they see the locals as other than themselves. We also do see evidence that sometimes foreign fighters are used as death squads by rebel groups because they are not, you know, people who are going to attack civilians without it being their local, their neighbors, not going to have to worry about reprisals against their own families. We saw this happen, let's say, in the Russian Civil War 100 years ago, where there were a lot of East Asian volunteers on the communist side, mostly laborers who had already been there before the revolution started, who were used. And you see this in propaganda posters of stereotypical Asian death squads marching around. And we see this in Kashmir and other places as well, where it's the foreign fighters who were brought in specifically to kill civilians. So there is broad data and anecdotes that show that this does happen. There are instances of, I would say, foreign fighters being used as cannon fodder, as we've discussed. The ones who don't, the ones who aren't used as cannon fodder, the ones who survive, there's this Darwinian effect. So most people coming in as foreign fighters from outside don't have great life expectancy. We see fatality rates as high as 30% in a lot of these cases, whether it's fascist volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. There were not as many as on the communist side, but there were some fascists. It didn't go well for them. Some of the ISIS volunteers as well, similar rates. But the ones who survive end up becoming leaders. They end up being hired, basically, by other insurgencies in other countries. Some of them serve in five or six different civil wars and become leaders of the rebels in countries where they'd never lived before. And they go on and they do trainings of other jihadis, even write manuals for them. And that gives them enhanced credibility. A good example of that is Abu Musab al-Zakawi, who was the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was the main insurgent group against U.S. forces in Iraq from about 2005 onwards. He was a Jordanian, you know, and he turned up and he was full of zeal. He'd been in Afghanistan. Just a guy who was an ex-jailbird, you know, he'd been in prison in Jordan, turned to jihad to kind of purify himself, then turned up in Iraq. And I think brought with him a lot of contacts and a lot of money. And he was a sort of organizer par excellence, but also brought in the sectarian element of it with massacring Shia Muslims as well as fighting the Americans. really kind of stirred the sectarian civil war there. And generally just started that dynamic that ultimately ended, yeah, with the local Iraqi fighters often turning against al-Qaeda, the foreign fighters, because they brought in that brutal strand of combat and that sectarian strand that ended up with the Sunni awakening in 2007, 2008, you know, and that General Petraeus exploited with the troop surge. and, you know, pretty much encapsulated everything you've just said, really, in terms of the zealotry that they brought in was useful in the early days, but ultimately ended up backfiring and took the wind out of the anti-U.S. insurgency in the end. So we've discussed the prevalence of foreign fighters as a part of warfare over time. It's a consistent aspect of warfare all around the world. We've listed some reasons why people volunteer to fight in foreign wars, and we discussed the impact of foreign fighters on the battlefield. I'd like to close out the conversation with the implications of this conversation and both of your research projects for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars. Most countries don't like their citizens becoming foreign fighters. Sometimes they encourage them. There are some governments now saying, yes, go off to Ukraine. That's great. Or go fight Assad, you know, or go fight ISIS. But most of the time, it's seen as a challenge to national citizenship and norms of military service. I think that we are seeing this backdoor route where people are now incentivized to become foreign volunteers in Ukraine and elsewhere as a way to cash in afterwards to go corporate, you know, to create security contracting firms. And we are seeing this happen. So that is just something that I think states need to think about a little bit. the first international laws against foreign fighting don't actually come until the ISIS era. There's UN Security Council resolutions that require every state to prevent its citizens from going to join Islamic State or Al-Qaeda affiliate elsewhere, requires us to repatriate and prosecute them when they do, which has also been an issue because not every country is one of the repatriated citizens. When they've gone off to ISIS, increasingly countries are bringing them back. They're still the detention camps, but they're trying to empty them out right now. But those only apply to al-Qaeda and ISIS. Becoming a foreign fighter for some other group, now I think there are incentives that governments are going to have to watch out that if they're letting their citizens go off and join other things, even if it's a cause that is popular, even if it's a cause that is supportable for national security reasons, they do need to think about the implications of them increasingly being likely to go join multinational forces elsewhere. Yeah. I mean, if you look at the war in Ukraine, obviously it's a completely different war to anything that any Western military has fought in recent years. One thing I have noticed is that of all the foreign volunteers I've interviewed, I often ask them, have you ever been invited back by your old unit for a chat, you know, to pass on a bit of tips? And very few of them have. I think one of them said, yes, my old sergeant invited me to chat to the guys. And that surprises me because you've got thousands of foreign volunteers who could potentially now be quite a useful asset, you would think, for NATO commanders, say, in Britain, for example. You could be getting them in to tell generations of future soldiers what it's actually like. And they don't seem to be drawing on that much at all. There are plenty around like that. And I am surprised that no sort of organized effort has been made to get those people in. Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, I think there is a consensus in the U.S. military establishment that Ukraine is a great laboratory for understanding what the future of war looks like. And what you're talking about wouldn't even have to be a U.S. government level organized program to hire these people. It could just be a local tactical unit commander who happens to be networked in saying, hey, can you come do, you know, an engagement with my unit for two hours and just tell us what modern warfare looks like. It's an interesting observation that that may not be happening systematically. Yeah. It's not without precedent, though. World War II breaks out and the only Americans of fighting age with combat experience were Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteers, right? And they were not permitted to go serve in combat roles. Even when they were drafted to the military, they were seen as suspect. They were seen as not reliable, maybe connected to the Soviet Union, which was an ally, but still. So I think that states tend to not trust people who've been volunteers elsewhere. This is really interesting. I don't want to stop the conversation, but we've already gone over time. So Colin Freeman and David Mount, thank you so much for joining us today on the Irregular Warfare Podcast. You're welcome. Thank you. It was a pleasure, Kyle. Thank you. Thanks again for listening to episode 145 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, I speak with General Wayne Ayer, the former Canadian Chief of Defense Staff, Dr. Noel Anderson from the University of Toronto, and Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Matt Kuhlman, Deputy Editorial Director at IWI, on the role of indirect and proxy war in modern conflict. After that, Ben Jeb and I discuss adapting U.S. industry for future wars with Dr. Seth Jones from the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the current Army Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Alex Miller. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you do not miss an episode. You can also engage with us on X, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and across many other platforms. If you found value in today's conversation, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast. It really does help us reach new audiences. And one last thing, what you heard in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of West Point, Princeton University, the Irregular Warfare Initiative, or any agency of the U.S. or any other government. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time. Thank you.