Help wanted

New techniques attract young recruits to battle zones

Reviewed by Sheilla Jones

Winnipeg Free Press, Books E11, March 19, 2016

The Killing Game: Martyrdom, Murder and the Lure of ISIS

By Mark Bourrie

HarperCollins, 273 pages, $33

It is remarkably difficult to get people to kill other people, especially people on the other side of the world who present no immediate threat to them or their loved ones.

"It takes a lot of physical and mental training to kill when self-defence is not involved," writes author Mark Bourrie in The Killing Game: Martyrdom, Murder and the Lure of ISIS. So how do recruiters — whether the Canadian military or the extremist group that calls itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) — go about seducing young men to kill for them?

Bourrie is an award-winning journalist who has written a dozen books, mainly on politics, propaganda and censorship, including his most recent book, last year’s Kill the Messengers: Stephen Harper’s Assault on Your Right to Know.

He says recruiters attract men using ads that heavily mimic violent, first-person-shooter video games such as Call of Duty. In 2015, says Bourrie, the Canadian military ran recruiting ads on YouTube filled with flash explosions, thumping helicopter rotors and gunfire, specifically targeting bored, testosterone-drenched young men with video game-like excitement.

"The ads and ISIS’s propaganda are directed at the same group of people — military-age men — so they use the extreme, graphic violence that is part of the new language of young men raised on video games and CGI," Bourrie writes. "They appeal to cravings for action, not to patriotism or to public service. Many of the men in the target audience don’t have much going for them. The chance to breathe life into their fantasies, a world in which war is fun and they are heroes, is seductive."

Bourrie notes foreign fighters who join ISIS tend to die in short order, but at this point there are believed to be 60 to 150 Canadians in Iraq or Syria fighting with ISIS. That isn’t very many when you consider some 1,200 Canadians fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Most were teenage boys enduring the Great Depression who saw ads in big city newspapers offering adventure and free travel.

The Killing Game focuses on recruitment techniques used by terrorist groups, including the stories of Canadians who joined the ISIS fight, many of whom are now dead. The book is fragmented at times, with storylines begun, dropped, and then picked up in later chapters. Bourrie demonstrates his knowledge and expertise, but the book would have benefited from being better organized.

The strength of The Killing Game is the way Bourrie puts the ISIS conflict into perspective. Hitler’s Nazis used the latest in fashion, logos, imagery and — most importantly — the new medium of television as powerful propaganda tools. ISIS, meanwhile, uses the latest in social media to deliver its propaganda throughout the world. Military trainers know soldiers with tight bonds to their comrades will more readily kill; ISIS uses the "bonds of atrocity" to turn college boys into moral and legal outlaws. (Despite its highly publicized atrocities, ISIS isn’t even the most lethal terrorist group in the world; Boko Haram in Nigeria holds that title.)

Bourrie also puts "lone-wolf" terrorist acts — the kind witnessed on Ottawa’s Parliament Hill in October 2014 — into perspective. According to CSIS documents, most attacks in the world (40 per cent) are fuelled by personal grievances and are not attached to any religious or political cause. Islamic extremism (15 per cent) is tucked between right-wing and neo-Nazi extremism (17 per cent) and left-wing and "black power" extremism (13 per cent). Anti-abortionists account for another eight per cent.

Interestingly, Bourrie concludes ISIS has been largely ineffective in Canada at attracting foreign fighters or inciting lone-wolf attacks on Canadian soil. The terrorist group certainly attracts its share of the world’s mercenaries, sadists, thrill-killers, sociopaths and the suicidal, but apparently Canadians are just not that interested in any game that involves killing real people.

Sheilla Jones is a Winnipeg author who, for a while, shared the rent with a foreign black-ops commando with a strict code about who he would and would not kill.