General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Really ?? 20,000 foreign fighters flock to Syria, Iraq to join Islamic State [View all]CJCRANE
(18,184 posts)about two years ago and followed it for a couple of months.
They have several strands to their propaganda. The first one is the humanitarian argument. They portrayed Assad as a tool of the west who was massacring his people. So some of them went over there to help in humanitarian aid and others to fight the Assad regime.
They believe that democracy is a sham and point to the various atrocities committed by the neocons and warmongers to justify this view. So they believe the answer is to replace "man-made laws" with "God-given laws". Hence the "Khilafa", their version of the promised land.
They believe that jihad is an obligation and that all believers should join them. So anyone who doesn't join them is against them. (So they are against pretty much everyone else).
They have a massive social media reach where they blast these ideas to (I assume) millions of people. I saw thousands on the group I found. I think they also have thousands of sockpuppets so it seems that there are more of them and this convinces others that they are a strong movement.
I'd guess that most of their followers are young, ignorant, gullible, naive people because the version of history, politics and religion they pushed was very simple and very distorted (and only people who didn't know much about anything could believe it).