The year 2015 was marked by a nervous temporality for Tunisians, as the stagnant, slack time of intensified economic downturn was punctuated by a series of high-profile terrorist attacks. This uneasy sense of a nation under siege at the fragile moment of its democratic transition was compounded by the worrisome statistic that Tunisia contributes the greatest number of foreign recruits to Islamist militias waging “jihad” in Syria and Iraq. What accounts for the allure of militancy among Tunisian youth at precisely the moment when dictatorship has been overcome? In televised public service spots, billboards, and other forms of public address, the Tunisian state disavows terrorism as a foreign ideological threat encroaching from the outside. Drawing on the language of “us” and “them,” these ads foreground the role of Islamist proselytism in luring youth to violent extremism. Against such sensationalized media images of the brainwashed Tunisian jihadist, this paper will examine the lives of Tunisian youth who have left for the conflict in Syria through the lens of everyday political economy. While eschewing any easy reference to a single causal factor driving Tunisian participation in the Syrian civil war, I foreground the practical dilemmas facing youth mired in conditions of deepening socio-economic precariousness, which often leads to the endless deferral of ordinary aspirations. Reconstructed through interviews with family members left behind in Tunisia, these young men’s life histories reveal reoccurring patterns of unemployment, under-payment, dead-end jobs, informal labor, and wage theft by employers, locating them squarely within the global class of insecure workers Guy Standing (2011) identifies as “the Precariat.” Through these narratives, travel to Syria emerges as merely one episode in a larger, often inter-generational story of crossing borders in search of work opportunities, informal labor, and improved life chances. This material allows me to draw connections between the contemporary phenomenon of “jihad” and the transnational itineraries traced by poor and downwardly mobile Tunisians in their daily struggle to make ends meet (Meddeb 2011). I ask whether, for some, the lure of engagement in a militia abroad lies not in any millennial utopian fantasy, but rather as a form of work.