Saturday, July 02, 2016

Broad appeal

Sudan Tribune with a report on the apparent death of a well-connected Sudanese ISIS recruit --

Reliable sources told Sudan Tribune that Hamza Sirar Hamza al-Hassan was likely killed in a coalition airstrike against on ISIS’s Iraqi hub of Mosul last Monday. Al-Hassan, a nephew of the famous Islamist businessman Abdel-Basit Hamza, was among the second group of medical students enrolled in the University of Medical Sciences and Technology (UMST) who flew from Khartoum to Istanbul to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq last year. The group consisted of 12 students, including the daughter of a senior government official. 10 of the students carried British travel documents. 

A couple of things to note. First, the profile of the Sudanese contingent doesn't fit the narrative that the appeal of ISIS lies in poor job prospects. Second, who would be the UK Home Secretary under whose watch visas were being handed out -- unconstrained by EU policy, since this is non-EU migration -- to ISIS recruits?

[side note: this may be the strike in which he was killed]

UPDATE: The Dhaka restaurant attackers likewise fit the pattern of being well off in their societies.

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