Legion of foreign fighters battles for Islamic State

One day this April, instead of coming home from school, two teenagers left their valley high in the Caucasus, and went off to war.
In Minneapolis, Minnesota, a 20-year-old stole her friend's passport to make the same hazardous journey.
From New Zealand, came a former security guard; from Canada, a hockey fan who loved to fish and hunt.
And there have been many, many more: between 16,000 and 17,000, according to one independent Western estimate, men and a small number of women from 90 countries or more who have streamed to Syria and Iraq to wage Muslim holy war for the Islamic State.

Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the group's leader, has appealed to Muslims throughout the world to move to lands under its control to fight, but also to work as administrators, doctors, judges, engineers and scholars, and to marry, put down roots and start families.
"Every person can contribute something to the Islamic State," a Canadian enlistee in Islamic State, Andre Poulin, says in a videotaped statement that has been used for online recruitment. "You can easily earn yourself a higher station with God almighty for the next life by sacrificing just a small bit of this worldly life."

The contingent of foreigners who have taken up arms on behalf of Islamic State during the past 3 1/2 years is more than twice as big as the French Foreign Legion. The conflict in Syria and Iraq has now drawn more volunteer fighters than past Islamist causes in Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia and an estimated eight out of 10 enlistees have joined Islamic State.

Ten to 15 per cent of the enlistees are believed to have died in action. Hundreds of others have survived and gone home; their governments now worry about the consequences.
"We all share the concern that fighters will attempt to return to their home countries or regions, and look to participate in or support terrorism and the radicalization to violence," Nicholas J Rasmussen, director of the US government's National Counterterrorism Center, told a Senate hearing earlier this year.
"Just like Osama bin Laden started his career in international terrorism as a foreign fighter in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the next generation of Osama bin Ladens are currently starting theirs in Syria and Iraq," ICSR director Peter Neumann told a White House summit on combating extremist violence in February.

One problem in choking off the flow of recruits has been the variety of their profiles and motives.
"There is no typical profile," according to a study by German security authorities, obtained by AP.
The study reported that among people leaving that country for Syria out of "Islamic extremist motives," 65 per cent were believed to have prior criminal records.
Areeb Majeed, 23, from a suburb of Mumbai, India, joined Islamic State in May 2014 and fought for six months, killing up to 55 people and taking a gunshot to the chest.
He eventually called his parents from Turkey and asked to come home, according to Indian newspapers.