Recruitment Apace

"Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi [caliph of Islamic State] has called for all Muslims to come to their land, so the process is much less stringent."
"Almost any Muslim who wants to travel now can. They want everyone to come."
"A friend in Aleppo told me there was someone they needed to bring to Syria. He said they would be guests in the country. So I took them to my home when they arrived."
"The first 'guest' was a jihadist from Saudi Arabia. The second a Tunisian, and it went from there. Most of them are from the Gulf and the United Arab Emirates."
Abu Ahmed, Syrian living in Turkey

"Each day foreigners are joining more and more, from all over the world: Yemen, the Magreb and the West."
"They feed the youngsters lies. They tell them 'We will attack Rome' and 'Today there was operation in the U .S.'  None of this is true, but they say it to seem all-powerful. They are working to destroy a whole generation. The ideas they implant will be hard to remove."
Abu Abdullah, eastern Syria

"They are trying to improve their image; to go from being a bunch of men too extreme even for al-Qaeda to jihadists that are fighting the crusader enemy."
Charlie Winter, researcher, Quilliam Foundation

An Islamic State group fighter loads a mortar shell during clashes with Iraqi security forces in Ramadi

The 'chatter' on Internet forums the Quilliam Foundation is interested in reveals that the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham has relaxed the regulations it has formerly used to wean out conscripts for their militias. No longer looking for spies, only for useful bodies infused with jihad. The vetting procedures for foreign recruits are no longer as careful as they once were. Training camps have been expanded, all in the drive to enlarge the Islamic "caliphate".

The encouragement through its propaganda arm, exhorting foreign-born Islamists to become part of their revolution has been expanded, has become more generously inclusive. Those foreign-born jihadists have become most useful in the propaganda that originally convinced them to join their fate with that of Islamic State.

They have been loyal and eager to learn all the elements of their irregular type of warfare, even to willingly lending themselves to the special arts of beheading and mass slaughter. Evidence the videos highlighting the executioners in the mass beheading processes, identified as foreigners from among other places, France and Britain.

Besides which, Islamic State has been losing its fighters at a sometimes-alarming rate, given the product of the U.S.-led bombing raids, when they've been successfully targeted. Martyrdom is all very well and good, but excess numbers of martyrs can only be harmful to the advance of the cause, after all, a conundrum not lost on the ISIS leadership.

A report by the Long War Journal identifies 46 training camps for Islamic State, with 34 located in Syria and a dozen in Iraq. Some of them are shared with Jabhat al-Nusra along with several other smaller jihadist units. According to Abu Ahmed who operates a safe house and funnels jihadist recruits into the country, the numbers of foreigners have increased impressively, now that the "stringent" checks have been dispensed with.

A balance to the successes of the U.S. and allied airstrikes against jihadist positions. Abu Abdullah, a former bodyguard for the emir of Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria spoke with disgust of the strenuous efforts put into indoctrinating the local population with an especial, and often successful focus on recruiting their children into ISIS; teens who attend propaganda indoctrination camps and come away convinced of the righteousness of ISIS, to their parents' horror.