The path to death

These people lived next to us, and then climbed and left. On the Donbass - to fight for the self -proclaimed republics. On the Donbass - to fight as part of the volunteer ATO battalions. Or in Syria. To fight against the troops of Assad, against the Russians, against the international coalition, confused in countless groups with heavy names for the Russian ear. “Up to four thousand from Russia, and five thousand from the republics of the former Soviet Union,” said the number of our fellow citizens who fight on the side of the militants in Syria, Vladimir Putin during the recent meeting with the sailors of the Northern Fleet, who just returned from Syria. In the summer of 2015, the head of the Council of People's Commissars, Nikolai Patrushev, claimed that there are more than a thousand Russians for the militants and it is still impossible to stop the increase in the number of such volunteers. Later, Deputy Director of the FSB Sergey Smirnov called another figure - 2.4 thousand people. Now - "up to four thousand approximately." And among these thousands - not only immigrants from the Islamic regions of the Russian Federation. The war, the inevitable and deliberately cultivated atrocities, constant risk and death as the only prospect are so attractive that they can make you change faith and even a name.

NT has already turned to this topic - we wrote about those who, of their own free will, returned from a distant and alien war, with those who were disappointed and even ready to suffer a punishment in their homeland, just to get a chance for a normal life (see NT No. 22 of June 29, 2015 ). Today, our interlocutor is among those who chose to stay in Syria and have no disappointment.

Of course, it is impossible to approve his choice, but it is all the more important to try to understand his motives, to figure out what drives him and thousands of others, which is why people flee the world to war. In the end, if the fight against terrorism is a real task, and not a propaganda stamp, then the analysis of the causes that pushing people to go to die at the other end of the world is the most important thing.

Our interlocutor went from left -wing activism to jihad. I searched for the possibility of political action in Russia, but found only tightly cleaned political field. Anarchist from Kaluga, he is now somewhere in Syria. And a similar choice of the most radical young people, to whom politics is not indifferent, is a terrible fee for the conscious work of the state to destroy the political sphere. Our interlocutor there, in Syria, is looking for politics and, not realizing how terrible details of what it seems to him now ordinary, his words contradict, is ready to talk about the Islamists as a new “revolutionary class”, and about the Jamaats as an anarchist utopian.

And of course, it is worth noting separately that state propaganda helped him decide on the choice. Too many, before a strange time, devoted a TV to the success of the Islamists, describing the situation in Syria and Iraq, although, it would seem, the task of the state propagandists was the opposite - to prove the insignificance and doom of the “jihad warriors”. Sooner or later, the efforts of propaganda had to give their shoots. They gave them.

* ISIS ("Islamic State", IG) - an organization banned in Russia as terrorist.