November 29 2013
The United States and European Union are seeing some radicalized young Muslims from their own shores going to Syria to fight, a development that raises fears they might return home to conduct terrorist attacks.
The war is providing a training ground for radical Islamists from other nations, according to Matthew Olsen, director of the US government’s National Counterterrorism Center.
“Syria has become really the predominant jihadist battlefield in the world,” Olsen last week said at the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colorado. “We see foreign fighters going from Western Europe and—in a small number of cases—from the United States to Syria to fight for the opposition.”
About 600 fighters have gone to Syria from the 28 states of the European Union, according to Gilles de Kerchove, the EU’s counter-terrorism coordinator. That number grows to the thousands if fighters from the Balkans and North Africa are counted, he said.
“The scale of this is completely different from what we’ve experienced in the past with Afghanistan, Pakistan, with Yemen and Somalia,” de Kerchove said.
Most of those from Europe are self-radicalized and traveling on their own initiative, as opposed to being recruited by a radical network, de Kerchove said.
He called it “a bit surprising” that they are going to Syria, to fight Shiite Muslims, rather than going the Mali, where France has intervened militarily to push back advances by Islamic radicals. That may be the case because travel is easier to Syria, through Turkey, and because many of the young radicals are more attracted to urban conditions rather than Mali’s vast desert, he said.
Those men may pose a threat in their home nations if they survive and return home, he said. European governments lack the capabilities to monitor all of them around the clock, he added.
Olsen declined to disclose US estimates of the numbers headed to Syria from the United States, though he said the scale has been increasing recently.
“The concern going forward from a threat perspective is there are individuals traveling to Syria, becoming further radicalized, becoming trained and then returning as part of really a global jihadist movement to Western Europe and, potentially, to the United States,” Olsen said.
Richard Barrett, former coordinator of the UN Al-Qaeda Taliban Monitoring Team, said the risks are real. At the same time, he said, it is important to recognize that not all who return home will be inclined to conduct terrorism.