By Catherine Putz
No, there are probably not 4,000 Tajiks in Syria.
There is a game children play where one thinks of a sentence and whispers it into the ear of another. The second child listens and then repeats the phrase to the next. We call it telephone in the United States, and the result is always the same: the original phrase is changed with each ear that hears it. The final sentence is often completely unlike the original.
Figuring out how many Central Asians are fighting with ISIS is like a game of telephone, complicated by multiple voices doing the whispering, misquoted and misreported figures, and deliberate misinformation from both ISIS and Central Asian governments.
A report last week from Daniil Turovsky, a correspondent for the Riga-based Meduza which launched an English-language site in February, that was republished on the Guardian, had two numbers regarding Central Asians fighting with ISIS that serve to focus this confusion. What is likely a simple error, an oversight by the author and editors, nonetheless contributes to a cacophony of estimates. The subhead of the Guardian piece says that “[u]p to 4,000 central Asian migrants are said to have travelled to Syria after being recruited by Chechens in Moscow.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat