The Jihadists

From last weekend's NYT magazine, Katherine Zoepf tries to understand what motivates Jihadists:

Today [Abu Sulayman] notes that the Qaeda camps where he worked as a training instructor offered him clear professional advancement. His new life in a middle-class Jeddah suburb, doing shift work at an electrical company doesn’t provide the same sense of purpose. Even so, he has little regard for those who have followed in his footsteps.

“Most people just want to carry weapons,” Abu Sulayman said. They do not, as he put it, have especially sophisticated religious arguments. “For me, it was always more about the feeling that I wanted to help the Muslims. But jihad is complicated. If you’re heading to Afghanistan or Iraq, do you really have the facts you need to get involved on the right side?