Islamic State: Lebanon’s economic collapse drives recruitment

Islamic State: Lebanon’s economic collapse drives recruitment

- Published

Ahmed is still a teenager, but instead of studying he spends every day at work.

He lives in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, one of the poorest places on the Mediterranean. Despite the hours he puts in, he leaves with just a few dollars a week. He needs to support his sick mother, but his back-breaking manual job earns him barely enough to feed them both.

That sense of hopelessness led him to search for a way out. In an internet café in Tripoli, he began chatting to a man who told Ahmed he was a recruiter for the Islamic State group - the radical Sunni Islamist militants who once controlled large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq, and who have committed atrocities and terror attacks throughout the region and around the world.

"I was studying Sharia [Islamic laws], and day after day they taught us about jihad," Ahmed told me. "They told us about Iraq and the Islamic State group [IS]. We loved IS, because it was famous. I was contacted by a man in prison, and he told me 'I'm going to send you there'."

Slight and quietly-spoken, it's hard to imagine Ahmed being a fighter. We talked about