A New Foreign Legion

Michael Daly writes for The Daily Beast, the online arm of Newsweek, here about ISIS jihadis and their motivations. He begins with a generalization:

The same way that the fight for the Spanish Republic in the 1930s drew romantic idealists from all over the world, the jihad for an Islamic caliphate is attracting psychopathic losers from seemingly everywhere.

These vile volunteers from at least 25 nations include not just the British-accented monster who has been videoed beheading Western hostages, but a fighter who sounds distinctly Trinidadian.

[Its] power does not reside in how ISIS manages to horrify us, in the joy its psychos take while committing the most ghastly murders, in how hot they are for coldblooded killing.

Its power ultimately derives from how unhorrified its frontline fighters are at the prospect of their own deaths. What scares them is the prospect of returning to the lives such as they led before jihad.

What Daly describes, sans label, is the Prophet's Own Foreign Legion, a collection of losers and misfits seeking meaning in otherwise aimless lives, and martyrdom. We must facilitate that latter goal.