Iraq and Syria have become “international finishing schools” for extremists according to a UN report which says the number of foreign fighters joining terrorist groups has spiked to more than 25,000 from more than 100 countries.
The panel of experts monitoring UN sanctions against al-Qaida estimates the number of overseas terrorist fighters worldwide increased by 71% between mid-2014 and March 2015.
It said the scale of the problem had increased over the past three years and the flow of foreign fighters was “higher than it has ever been historically”.
The overall number of foreign terrorist fighters has “risen sharply from a few thousand … a decade ago to more than 25,000 today,” the panel said in its report to the UN security council, which was obtained by Associated Press.
The report said just two countries had drawn more than 20,000 foreign fighters: Syria and Iraq. They went to fight primarily for the Islamic State group but also the al-Nusra Front.
Looking ahead, the panel said the thousands of foreign fighters who travelled to Syria and Iraq were living and working in “a veritable ‘international finishing school’ for extremists”, as was the case in Afghanistan in the 1990s.
A military defeat of the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq could have the unintended consequence of scattering violent foreign terrorist fighters across the world, the panel said. And while governments are focusing on countering the threat from fighters returning home, the panel said it was possible that some may be traumatised by what they saw and need psychological help, and that others may be recruited by criminal networks.
In addition to Syria and Iraq, the report said Afghan security forces estimated in March that about 6,500 foreign fighters were active in the country. And it said hundreds of foreigners were fighting in Yemen, Libya and Pakistan, about 100 in Somalia, and others in the Sahel countries in northern Africa, and in the Philippines.
The number of countries the fighters come from has also risen dramatically from a small group in the 1990s to more than 100 today — more than half the countries in the world — including some that have never had previous links with groups associated with al-Qaida, the panel said.
It cited the “high number” of foreign fighters from Tunisia, Morocco, France and Russia, the increase in fighters from the Maldives, Finland and Trinidad and Tobago, and the first fighters from some countries in sub-Saharan Africa which it did not name. The groups had also found recruits from Britain and Australia.
The panel said the fighters and their networks posed “an immediate and long-term threat” and “an urgent global security problem” that needed to be tackled on many fronts and had no easy solution.
With globalised travel, it said, the chance of a person from any country becoming a victim of a foreign terrorist attack was growing “particularly with attacks targeting hotels, public spaces and venues”.
But the panel noted that a longstanding terrorist goal is “generating public panic” and stressed that the response needed to “be measured, effective and proportionate”.
It said the most effective policy was to prevent the radicalisation, recruitment and travel of would-be fighters.
The panel noted that less than 10% of basic information to identify foreign fighters had been put in global systems and called for greater intelligence sharing. As a positive example, it noted that the “watchlist” in Turkey — a key transit point to Syria and Iraq — now included 12,500 individuals.
