What We Can Learn From a Young, Grassroots Jihadist in Pittsburgh

The long and brutal civil war in Syria all began in March 2011, when the arrest of 15 young men in the southeastern city of Daraa spurred a cascade of escalating protests against the government. The city was then bombed, besieged, starved and squeezed for nearly a decade, until the Syrian army and its allies finally reconquered what little of it remained in July 2018. During the years of peak violence, many residents fled to nearby Jordan, where they were placed in camps alongside the Syrian border. While many remain in those camps to this day, a fortunate few were able to apply for refugee status and receive resettlement in third countries. A young man from Daraa, who I will intentionally not name here, was among the lucky ones. Upon being granted refugee status, he and his family were flown to the United States in August 2016, where they were resettled in a public housing...