Terrorism and terrorist recruitment is something that there really is no simple solution for stopping. There is no method of brute force and no amount of bombs dropped that will completely eradicate terrorism. The reason is that it is near impossible to tell the difference between a civilian and a terrorist and the majority of people that end up suffering are the civilians. Unless you nuke an entire area (not AT ALL a suggestion), you will essentially never solve the problem with traditional fighting methods. Ultimately more youths will continue to flow into terrorist organization which use them for cannon fodder and make the problem worse. So how do we stop the continued recruitment of youths into terrorist organizations?
First we should talk about how mass scale terrorism is usually born. The large terrorist organizations we see today and have seen in the past, usually form out of some event that triggered mass scale anger and discontent amongst a certain population. Terrorism on large scales 9/10 times happens in countries that lack economic development and stability that you might see in first world nations. The middle east currently is a terrorism hotbed primarily because there is no stability in everyday life and death sometimes seems a better option than to live in the hell they do. This is a technique terrorists use to their advantage.
One of the primary reasons we have seen a large amount of extremist Muslim terrorists, is because religion is used as a tool for recruitment. When a foreign nation like the US drops a bomb in Iraq that kills a young boy’s entire civilian family, instantly he becomes a prime target for recruitment. Young, pissed off and angry at the country that killed his family, he is willing to do anything to get revenge. When an extremist religious leader tells him that he can fight back against the evil that caused him pain and also earn passage into heaven, they jump at the chance. These youths are recruited and turned into religious extremists because they have nothing left to care about.
If these youths were living in happy families with a stable way of live and future prospects of a happy life filled with love, employment, children and a family of their own, they wouldn’t be turning to extremism. However the prospect of that life has been taken and anything but death and destruction seems so far away. When someone comes to you and says, “Life is not over, you can still do gods work and reach heaven for doing it”, they listen. This is why terrorist organizations have had such luck in recruiting the past decade, there are millions of people who are war-torn and have nothing to live for. At this point recruiting them is easy. If we want to stop the recruitment process we need to help provide some sort of stability.
The current terrorism problems that world is facing in places like Europe is a direct consequence for decades of war and instability in the middle east, caused by foreign nations. The US in particular has overthrown multiple governments because we disagreed with political stances and allowed radical extremism to grow. We have a long history of laying waste to a country, pulling out and letting it clean up its own mess. If we are going to overthrow a country and destroy it, we need to deal with the consequences that come with it. If not, we shouldn’t be invading the country in the first place.
We need to support the starving and war torn people with food supplies and help them rebuild their country. We need a large military force to occupy the entire country , while at the same time training new troops to take over when we leave. We need to create stability before we pull out and transition back over very carefully. The youth must be engaged with and given knowledge about what extremists will plan to do with them and how they deceive them. Even if we do all this, there is no guarantee that it will even work.
The best way to avoid the recruitment of youth terrorists, is to avoid creating an atmosphere that breeds terrorism to begin with. The next best thing is educating them on their tactics and to give them a life worth living for. This issue is extremely complex and there really is no right answer. Every country has vastly different people that respond to different situations. The point we are at today is the culmination of decades of war. The consequences we are seeing now show the ripple effect and how long it can travel down the line.