“When I interviewed ICSR director Peter Neumann in September 2015, he explained that there were four main reasons he'd found for why ISIS fighters quit:

1. Recruits joined to fight Bashar al-Assad, but ended up largely fighting other Syrian rebels, and were disappointed by this.

2. Defectors believed ISIS was too brutal to fellow Sunni Muslims.

3. Defectors said ISIS leaders were corrupt and played favorites.

4. Many also said living conditions in ISIS territory were awful; they'd been promised a glorious caliphate but found squalor.”

Explore more quotes:


About the author

This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

Kendra Syrdal is a writer, editor, partner, and senior publisher for The Thought & Expression Company. Over the last few years she has been personally responsible for writing, editing, and producing over 30+ million pageviews on Thought Catalog.