Terrorism and fertility rates

Reading through a Times article in the Press on current conditions in Guantanamo Bay, my attention was drawn to a chart listing the nationalities of the remaining inmates (the figures were provided by the Brookings Institute but I can't find them online).

While only six current detainees come from "Axis of Evil"member Iraq, a staggering 38 percent of the remaining 245 inmates come from Yemen - a small, impoverished country that rarely makes it into the news, but happens to have to one of the world's highest fertility rates.

I then checked out the respective fertility rates, for the ten listed nationalities of Guantanamo inmates, at the CIA Factbook (the latest fertility rates are shown in parentheses):

94 Yemeni (6.32)
27 Afghani (5.8)
20 Saudi Arabian (3.83)
17 Chinese (1.79)
10 Algerian (1.79)
10 Tunisian (1.72)
8 Syrian (3.12)
8 Libyan (3.08)
6 Iraqi (3.86)
6 Kuwait (2.76)

With second and third placed Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan also having high fertility rates, it reasonable to conclude there's a pretty strong relationship between terrorist recruitment and a high fertility rate.

Historically, a country with a youthful demographic is more likely to be an aggressive country, and in the Muslim world this aggression tends to take the form of terrorism against rival sects or non-Muslims.

China bucks the trend with a below-replacement fertility rate, but relative to its huge population, it's not a particularly fertile source of terrorist recruits.

Not only do Yemen and Afghanistan have the highest fertility rates outside Sub-Suharan Africa, but they also lack significant oil revenues to help support the rising tide of hungry mouths they need to provide for.

Most Middle Eastern countries, either have successful population control programmes (such as Libya and Iran) or, like Saudi Arabia, have sufficient oil revenues to at least keep most people out of poverty for the next few decades.

If the current U.S. government is serious about winning the war on terror, it might want to look at what he can do to encourage Yemen to follow other Arab states like Libya and Algeria in adopting serious population control measures.