A new study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found there are 230,000 active Sunni jihadist fighters in the world today. If you add Shia fighters you have a total of around a half million fighters in the world today.
If you compare this to other armies in the global community the “jihadist army” would rank as the 9th largest army in the world.
And the jihadists have plenty of support.
63 million Muslims in eleven countries supported ISIS killers in a 2015 poll.
Daniel Greenfield at Frontpage Mag reported:
Islamic terrorists are a “tiny minority of extremists”. That’s the message we’ve been hearing ever since 9/11. They’re only a handful of “guys in a cave” or a few “lone wolves” radicalized over the internet.
How tiny is that tiny minority?
According to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, there are 230,000 Jihadists.
Put this tiny minority of extremists together in a city and you would have Boise, Idaho, or Richmond, Virginia, or Des Moines, Iowa. But that’s not a roster of Muslim civilians who support Islamic terrorism, just active members of terrorist groups. And so a better point of comparison is to national armies.
At 230,000, Sunni Islamic Jihadists outnumber the British Armed Forces (149,000), the French Armed Forces (117,000), and Germany’s Bundeswehr (179,753). That should be troubling since those are some of the militaries and countries on the front lines of Europe’s reluctant fight against Islamic incursions.
The list of Sunni fighters has a lot of questions marks and is incomplete. Sunnis outnumber Shiites, but under the Iranian umbrella, Shiites have fielded sizable terror forces in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen.
Hezbollah in Lebanon boasts between 25,000 to 65,000 Jihadists. The Houthis in Yemen, currently the beneficiaries of a massive propaganda campaign in the media, have around 25,000 to 30,000 Jihadists. Iraqi PMU’s add another 90,000 to 150,000 Jihadists to these numbers. And finally there’s Iran’s own Revolutionary Guard, a regional terror hub with another 120,000 members.
These numbers add between 260,000 and 365,000 Jihadists on the Shiite side for a total of over half a million Sunni and Shiite Jihadists making Islamic terrorists the world’s eighth largest military.
