Nov. 18, 2015
The New America Foundation launched a new report this week that used open sources to identify at least 475 people from 25 Western countries who have traveled to the region to become foreign fighters for Sunni jihadist groups. The report finds that the latest crop of foreign fighters is younger and has more women than the first generation of jihadis who traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s. They’re also suffering high mortality rates, with the dead numbering nearly two fifths of those in the think tank’s dataset.