Alwaght-A majority of Arab Muslim youths see the actions of extremists such as the ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorist groups as a perversion of Islam's teachings, a new poll reveals.
The Zogby Research Services poll of 5,374 young Muslim men and women from the Middle East and North Africa also found that many millennials blame corruption and repressive governments for the rise of jihadist groups.
"At least three-quarters of millennial respondents in all countries surveyed" said movements like ISIS and al-Qaeda "are either a complete perversion of Islam's teachings or mostly wrong," the polling firm said.
Millennials (also known as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y) are the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates when the generation starts and ends; most researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.
The opinion was conducted in October and November 2015 with respondents aged 15 to 34 in Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories.
More than 90 percent of respondents in Morocco and the UAE called both extremist groups a "complete perversion of Islam," as did 83 percent of respondents in Egypt and more than 60 percent in Bahrain and Jordan.
More than 55 percent of respondents in the Palestinian territories and Saudi Arabia also said the Takfiri terrorist groups were distorting Islam's teachings.
More than 30 percent of those polled in many countries, including 69 percent of respondents in the UAE and 50 percent in Morocco, said "corrupt, repressive, and unrepresentative governments" were the main causes of young men and women j o i ning extremist groups.
Others blamed extreme religious teachings and poor levels of education.
"In most countries, the majority says that religion does not need to be reformed" but rather that religious discourse "needs to be made more relevant," the polling firm's chief James Zogby said while releasing the survey results.
ISIS terrorists, some of whom were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control parts of Syria and Iraq. They have been engaged in crimes against humanity in the areas under their control. The Syrian government blames Western countries led by the US and their regional allies including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the Israeli regime of being the main backers of terrorists groups in the country.
Al-Qaeda, whose franchise in Syria is al-Nusra Front, is also a terror group that has carried out many attacks on civilian and military targets in various countries across the globe. The group is held responsible for instigating sectarian violence among Muslims.
