"I have hung around soldiers a fair bit. At least in the West, the men seem to favour talk of women, sports, and cars (not necessarily in that order or, indeed, separately). My Al Qaeda abductors wouldn’t have understood a word of such conversations. We in the West seem to get a big kick out of the seventy-two virgins bit but my captors didn’t seem to care much about women. In fact, they were absolutely uninterested in anything other than praising the Lord while passing the ammunition in a fight that they deeply believed to be His fight. Never have I seen people less interested in material stuff. Most of them were under twenty-five, all under forty-eight. They neither expected nor wanted to grow old and considered me to be extravagantly time expired. They did not covet cool sneakers or sports paraphernalia; they did not ape the latest fashion, or seek to emulate the antics and ethics of rock or film stars, or even dream of nickel-plating their AKs. Similarly, I have never met a less horny group of young men. There was no skulking out of the desert for a little R&R or even for chaste reunions with family and friends. Admittedly, this would have been risky for them as I suspect that the Algerian intelligence apparatus watches such people very carefully. Normal familial attachments and pleasures of the flesh seemed to hold little attraction. The mujahideen seemed perfectly content to talk and chant about Allah and their servitude to Him … endlessly."
(Robert Fowler. A Season In Hell: My 130 Days In The Sahara With All Qaeda)
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