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Why Do People Join ISIS? The Psychology Of A Terrorist
From an article in The International Business Times: “When Andre Poulin, a Canadian who converted to Islam, first appeared on YouTube in Syria last year, he said his family didn’t understand why he had moved to the country to fight with other jihadists against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces. Allah, he said during his video message, had pulled him to Syria. Poulin was just one of several Westerners to join the Islamic State, which at the time was just a small group of extremists vying for power. Now the Islamic State (also called ISIS) has obtained millions of dollars in new weaponry and is gaining more followers like Poulin, pledging allegiance to a group so barbaric that even al-Qaida has denounced it.
“We tend to think they are crazy,” John Horgan, a psychologist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Center for Terrorism and Security Studies, said. “Because of what terrorists do, we assume that can be explained via the pathology of those people, but trying to explain terrorism as mental illness is misleading.”
The recent beheadings of U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff set off a wave of fury on social media and forced Western leaders to publicly address ISIS’ barbarity. At the same time, news broke that dozens of young men — neighbors, sons, friends, from places like London and Minnesota — had left their homes to join the group.
Source: http://truthisscary.com/2014/09/why-do-people-join-isis-the-psychology-of-a-terrorist/
