IS fighters not flooding home as feared
AS RECENTLY as a year ago, United States and other Western counterterrorism officials feared that a major surge of Islamic State fighters would return home to Europe and North Africa to commit mayhem after being driven out of their strongholds in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqa, Syria.
Now, those cities have fallen to US-backed forces, but the number of combat-hardened returnees has been much smaller than anticipated, if still worrisome, counterterrorism officials say. That is in part because the Trump administration intensified its focus on preventing fighters from seeping out of those cities, and more militants fought to the death than expected. Hundreds also surrendered in Raqa, and some probably escaped to new battlegrounds in Libya or the Philippines.
“We’re not seeing a lot of flow out of the core caliphate because most of those people are dead now,” Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie Jr, the director of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, said last week. “Some of them are going to go to ground.”
Some 40,000 fighters from more than 120 countries poured into the battles in Syria and Iraq over the past four years, US officials say. Of the more than 5,000 Europeans who joined those ranks, as many as 1,500 have returned home, including many women and children, and most of the rest are dead or still fighting, according to Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union’s top counterterrorism official.
To be sure, Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, still poses a threat to Western countries, perhaps chiefly in the form of militants who are inspired or enabled by the group to attack at home, as evidenced by the recent attacks in Britain and Barcelona, officials say.
But a combination of factors has suppressed the flow of militants returning from war zones. Many died after allied and local forces cut off most escape routes from Raqa and Mosul. Since the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 and Brussels last year, European nations have tightened border security and increased surveillance. Others are believed to be bottled up in third countries like Turkey.
“I’ve been saying for a long time that there won’t be a ‘flood’ of returnees, rather a steady trickle, and that’s what we are seeing,” said Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study for Radicalization at King’s College London. “Many of them are stuck in the Turkish border areas, where they are contemplating their next move.”
As it becomes harder for Islamic State to plan attacks from Iraq and Syria, some plotters may have also moved to the Philippines or to Libya. The bomber who killed 22 people at a pop concert in Manchester, England, in May had met in Libya with members of an Islamic State unit linked to the Paris attacks, according to current and retired intelligence officials.
“We’re worried as the campaign in eastern Syria and Iraq winds down, we’ll continue to see fighters move into” Libya and northern Africa, Mike Pompeo, the CIA director, said at a security conference at the University of Texas this month.
After much criticism prompted by the Paris and Brussels attacks that European intelligence and law enforcement agencies were not cooperating with each other, those organisations have made significant improvements – with considerable US help – in identifying and tracking fighters who have returned, US and European officials say.
As for the attackers in France and Belgium, “that cell is largely gone, but there are still pieces to be found”, Manuel Navarrete, chief of the European Counterterrorism Center, said in an interview at the headquarters of Europol, an intelligence-sharing arm of the European Union.
European intelligence services, along with Interpol, have created major new databases of suspected foreign fighters; European spy agencies and Europol have also created counterterrorism hubs in the Netherlands for sharing information and mapping out strategy.
And a classified US military programme in Jordan called Operation Gallant Phoenix is scooping up data collected in commando raids in Syria and Iraq and funnelling it to law enforcement agencies in Europe and Southeast Asia. “That’s our intelligence- and informationsharing architecture,” General Joseph Dunford Jr, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in describing the programme to Congress in June.
Despite these advances, homegrown or inspired jihadists who have never travelled to war zones remain perhaps the largest threat.
“The continuing efforts of ISIL followers in Europe to conduct attacks demonstrate the potential for ISIL to recruit and motivate followers in Europe,” said a UN report in August. “Those attacks involved both individuals who were prevented from traveling to the conflict zones and individuals who had no prior intention to travel.”
The report said people returning from these conflict zones fell into three categories: First, those who were disenchanted by their experiences in Iraq or Syria and were good candidates to be reintegrated into society.
Second, a much smaller group who return intending to conduct terrorist attacks. And third, individuals who have cut ties with Islamic State and are disillusioned by the organisation, but who remain radicalised and are ready to join another terrorist group should the opportunity arise.
“It is an incredibly difficult adversary,” Pompeo said at a security conference in Washington last week. “They still have the capacity to control and influence citizens all around the world.”