Fee for Westerners on the 'Jihadi Highway': $25

Yonder lies adventure...for $25, whitefella jihadist.

Does god really care for your life in the suburbs? /
A dull little life full of dull little things /
Bring up the babies to be just like daddy /
And maybe you'll be there when he gives out the wings.

California-via-Blightly resident Richard Thompson's scathing indictment of the dreariness of modern life is partly shown by Americans and Britons dreaming of a more adventurous one that involves, er, killing fellow Americans and Britons as transplanted jihadists. To reach the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), however, these Western-hating Westerners must cross the border between Turkey and Syria. Apparently, there is now a roaring trade smuggling them into the latter's warzone.

More recently, the [Turkey-Syria] border has also become known as the jihadi highway, an easy way for non-Syrians from European countries such as the U.K., France and Belgium to join in Syria’s civil war. They often fight on the side of militant groups such as the Islamic State, which now controls large swathes of land south of Turkey’s border as well as significant parts of Iraq. And if the English-accented man shown in videos beheading two American journalists is identified as a British citizen, he may well have crossed the same border. 

Actually, the market-clearing price has gone up due to marginally higher difficulty entering jihadi paradise. Not much higher, mind you, but still...

As international condemnation of the murders draws renewed attention to this porous crossing point for Western passport-holding fighters, Turkey has stepped up patrols, added highway checkpoints and erected new fencing. It hasn’t worked, according to interviews with refugees, injured fighters recuperating in Turkish hospitals and with the smugglers who have long operated a black market ferrying people back and forth. As late as this week, illegal trips that skirted the Turkish controls were both simple and numerous.

The price: $25, with assurances that large amounts of equipment could be taken across with zero chance of inspection, according to three men who offered their services as traffickers. That’s up from about $10 a person before Turkish authorities cracked down on border security.

Ah, the smell of commerce; the World Cup of Jihad has switched locations. It's all unfolding according to an infamous dead guy's script. The prominence and sheer number of Western jihadists eager to kill and maim their own raises questions Anglophone countries have failed to answer. There is no better way to undermine the usual racist excuse that "foreigners" are destroying Western cultures than to point out that Anglos are the most avid of jihadists. Why is it that women are among the most eager to join an inherently sexist cause?

Those are big questions, but in the meantime, there is no shortage of Anglos desperate to fork over their $25 at the border for a taste of adventure.