The Boko Haram scourge won't stop until northern Muslims stop joining the rank and file of the group. Since 2009, the Islamic terrorist insurgency has not only escalated in degree of barbarity or it's scale of operation in the northeast but has also witnessed a steady aggressive recruitment drive. For every boko killed there are 10 more to take his place. There is also the disturbing situation were adolescent girls are recruited as reluctant suicide bombers by their own fathers. Boko Haram is a full scale jihad fully endorsed by th northern leaders and their followers. The situation is no different with ISIS with a new security report that detailed an average of 1,000 volunteer jihadis mainly from western Europe who head to Syria and Iraq every month. Another disturbing twist of information is that 80% of British Muslims support ISIS.
[size=18pt]‘1,000 recruits joining fight in Syria and Iraq each month’[/size]
Eric Schmitt & Michael S Schmidt, NYT News Service | Jan 14, 2015, 04.23AM IST
The number of people traveling abroad to fight continues to grow, with about 1,000 militant recruits joining the fight in Syria and Iraq each month, according to recent United States government figures.
WASHINGTON: For more than a decade, Western governments have struggled to stem the flow of their citizens traveling to fight in war zones in Muslim countries, increasing surveillance of those who have expressed an interest in joining extremists, creating computer programs to track suspicious travel patterns and taking other measures.
But last week's commando-style raids in France — carried out by at least one man who traveled to Yemen in 2011 to train alongside the Qaeda affiliate there — were deadly reminders that those measures have done relatively little to reduce the threat. The number of people traveling abroad to fight continues to grow, with about 1,000 militant recruits joining the fight in Syria and Iraq each month, according to recent United States government figures.
Worried that these returning militants could go for years without drawing attention, American and European counterterrorism officials have been scrambling to come up with new ways to stop their residents from traveling abroad to fight — efforts that have taken on greater urgency in light of the killings in France.
New or amended counterterrorism laws have been passed in countries like Albania, Australia, Bosnia, France, Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia, making it illegal to travel to fight in a foreign conflict, like the ones in Yemen, Syria and Iraq.
Malaysia and Saudi Arabia have issued bans prohibiting their citizens from joining the Islamic State. Arrests of people suspected of being militants have increased in Austria and Morocco, and foreign fighters have been prosecuted recently in Germany and the Netherlands.
In the United States, where about 150 people have tried or actually gone to fight in Syria, federal law enforcement officials have focused not only on monitoring social media networks more aggressively, but also on educating state and local authorities about ways to identify potential travelers.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has traveled to Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and other cities in recent months to promote partnerships between the federal government and state and local groups that are better positioned to detect potential militants in their midst.
"We haven't been able to stop the flow, but we have created more friction," said a senior State Department official who follows the issue closely. "We've made it harder."
But while law enforcement and intelligence agencies have gotten better at identifying and stopping Americans from traveling to Syria, American officials conceded there was still room for improvement. "I still don't think we have our hands around it," said one senior American official.
The United States seized on the issue last September and successfully pushed through a legally binding resolution at the United Nations Security Council that would compel all countries to take steps to "prevent and suppress" the flow of their citizens to groups considered to be terrorist organizations.
A particular focus has been on countries like Turkey, whose porous 500-mile border has allowed thousands of militants to cross into the Syrian battlefield and into Iraq. In 2013, Turkey denied entry to 4,000 people who had been on a no-entry list and detained more than 92,000 people on its border.
Some American officials have credited the Turkish government with more aggressively policing its border with Syria, but others said that the Turks are unlikely to ever be able to secure their border. "I can't say they've gotten any better," one official said.
Altogether, about 18,000 foreign combatants, including 3,000 Europeans and other Westerners, have traveled to fight in the region since the Syria conflict erupted in 2011, according to American intelligence estimates. More than 500 veterans of the Syria campaign have returned to Europe, according to Richard Barrett, a former British intelligence officer who has researched the figures for the Soufan Group, a security consultancy.
Not only are the number of fighters continuing to climb, but the Paris attacks may also indicate that the signature tactics of terrorist groups are shifting in a menacing way.
Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen has long been feared for its obsessive focus on aviation attacks, such as the failed attempt to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day in 2009. But Said Kouachi, the older of the two brothers suspected of killing 12 people at a satirical newspaper in Paris last week, had traveled to Yemen and received military-style training in automatic weapons there, the authorities say, as evidenced from the videos of the attack.
"The idea that a jihadist group, which historically used suicide bombs, would find a firearms attack meaningful violence is worrisome," said Daniel Benjamin, a former top counterterrorism official in the State Department who is now a scholar at Dartmouth.
War zones like Yemen or Syria also serve as incubators for budding terrorists. "They will form networks with other Western Muslims and establish ties to jihadists around the world," concludes a new Brookings Institution study of foreign fighters by Daniel Byman and Jeremy Shapiro. The sheer volume of fighters returning home has made tracking them difficult. American officials said that French intelligence and law enforcement agencies conducted surveillance on the Kouachi brothers after Said Kouachi returned from Yemen in 2011. But the French authorities at some point stopped the monitoring to focus on other threats.
Islamic militants have gone to fight in foreign wars dating to the mujahedeen who traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviet Army there.
What is different today, terrorism experts said, is the scale of the flow and the various reasons young Muslim men, and increasingly women and families, are flocking to Syria. Young men in Bosnia and Kosovo are traveling to Syria for financial gain, including recruiting bonuses some groups offer, counterterrorism specialists say. Others from the Middle East and North Africa are attracted more by the ideology and the Islamic State's self-declared status as a caliphate. Counterterrorism specialists have seen criminal gang members from as far as Sweden seeking adventure and violence in the fight.
Fears that former fighters may carry out attacks in their native countries have been intense since Mehdi Nemmouche, a 29-year-old French Muslim, killed four people at the Brussels Jewish Museum last May after spending a year in Syria. The French authorities knew he had gone to fight in Syria and had been told by German officials that he had returned to Europe.
France, with about five million Muslims, the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, has seen a growing number of calls for citizens to turn to jihad. More than 1,000 French citizens have left or plan to leave France to join the ranks of jihadist groups in Syria or Iraq, according to the French Interior Ministry. Mr. Barrett, the former intelligence officer, said perhaps 180 of them had returned.
"We don't know when these radical people are going suddenly to become terrorists," Gerard Araud, France's ambassador to the United States, said on Sunday.
In Britain, about half of the 600 people who have traveled to Syria to engage in terrorist-related activities have returned home, according to the authorities. "Working with our partners, we have stopped three U.K. terrorist plots in recent months alone," Andrew Parker, the head of Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5, said in a rare public speech last week.
Senior American authorities have identified "several dozen" Americans who have linked up with jihadist groups there like the Islamic State or the Nusra Front and then returned to the United States.
A first line of defense is family and friends, federal officials say. But often, people are too afraid to report that someone they know wants to fight abroad.
"We recognize that in a majority of these cases, someone in the individual's inner circle has knowledge that they intend to travel but doesn't report it out of fear of being arrested, prosecuted and public ridicule," said one senior American official.
In the case of a Florida man who killed himself in a suicide attack this year in Syria, the F.B.I. later learned that his parents had known that he traveled to Syria at least twice. "They didn't notify law enforcement and now their son is dead," said a senior American official. "You have to get involved early — the results may not be pleasant, but it's better than having a dead son."
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