Oscar Jr. Was Here

Jihadists per Capita

On Wednesday, UPI published an interesting article by John C. K. Daly which detailed the nationalities of the Guantanamo detainees. Many have focused on the relative magnitude of the numbers, with Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Pakistan leading the jihadi way (with 160, 85 and 82 detainees, respectively).

More interesting to me, though, is the relative number of detained terrorists after controlling for the population of the countries in question. This may serve as a rough proxy for each nation's relative propensity to generate future terrorists. To calculate this, I obtained from the C.I.A. World Factbook the estimate of the population of 15- to 64-year-old males. For countries with large populations of non-nationals, I adjusted the 15- to 64-year-old population by the percentage the countryies' nationals represented of its total population. Finally, I divided the number of detainees by the number of 15-to-64-year-old male nationals in millions. The results are:

		Adjusted # of
	Gitmo	15 to 64 Year	Jihadists
Country	Detainees	Old Males	per Million
Bahrain	7	172,500	40.6
Kuwait	12	396,354	30.3
Saudi Arabia	160	5,932,741	27.0
Yemen	85	4,972,946	17.1
Jordan	30	1,764,061	17.0
Afghanistan	80	8,240,743	9.7
Tajikistan	11	1,896,509	5.8
Tunisia	8	3,306,782	2.4
Qatar	1	415,302	2.4
Pakistan	82	43,571,093	1.9
Morocco	18	9,766,222	1.8
Algeria	19	10,460,475	1.8
Mauritania	1	743,573	1.3
Egypt	30	23,375,037	1.3
Georgia	2	1,628,757	1.2
Kazakhstan	5	5,425,545	0.9
Libya	1	1,692,154	0.6
Denmark	1	1,809,138	0.6
Turkey	11	22,978,251	0.5
Britain	9	20,067,529	0.4
Syria	2	5,238,026	0.4
France	7	19,619,994	0.4
Sweden	1	2,933,183	0.3
Australia	2	6,680,531	0.3
Belgium	1	3,400,419	0.3
Uzbekistan	2	7,781,739	0.3
Russia and Chechnya	10	49,399,322	0.2
Sudan	2	10,260,581	0.2
Canada	2	11,099,907	0.2
Iraq	1	7,033,268	0.1
Kenya	1	8,900,615	0.1
Spain	1	13,721,053	0.1
Germany	1	28,213,316	0.0
China	12	461,223,219	0.0
Bangladesh	1	44,261,739	0.0

Saudi Arabia and Yemen are still relatively large sources, but, adjusting for population, actually trail Bahrain (what's up with that?, Mahmood) and Kuwait in per million capita terms. Pakistan, while third in absolute number, falls to tenth after controlling for population. China, while tied for ninth in absolute number of detainees, perhaps unsurprisingly falls to second-to-last. Interesting, to me at least.

Update: Mahmood responds with a great post. Murdoc Online also comments. Posted by oscarjr at February 6, 2004 08:14 PM | TrackBack