UK PLANS TO PREVENT THE RETURN OF ITS ISIL FIGHTERS
▶ Bid to ban hundreds of extremists from coming home from Iraq and Syria
British officials are addressing the threat from hundreds of ISIL fighters trying to return from Syria and Iraq.
Security sources believe the number of those who may return is more than double the 150 who have been stripped of citizenship for terrorist activity abroad in recent years.
Work is under way in Whitehall, London, to identify the ISIL veterans.
Sources said that official watch lists of British citizens and residents recruited to ISIL was now a priority for the security services. Forty of the 150 people stripped of nationality since 2011 were removed from passport lists in the past year.
There are believed to be at least 350 UK ISIL recruits still active in the region, but primed to come back. Experts believe another 400 Britons have returned and some may have already slipped through the net.
Ben Wallace, the home office minister for security, said a range of measures were being introduced since ISIL started to lose territory.
“We are using a range of tools to disrupt and diminish that threat,” Mr Wallace said.
Hannah Stuart, a security expert at the Policy Exchange think tank, said the government’s extremism strategy was under careful scrutiny after terrorist attacks in London and Manchester this summer.
“The government has been very aware work needs to be don, not just counter-radicalisation efforts but also exclusion orders and other measures,” Ms Stuart said.
“Officials are looking at some of the programmes needing a harder edge, the impact of police cuts, issues of rules of engagement with operations of anti-terror police.”
Not all of those displaced from Syria and Iraq are planning a return to Britain.
Matteo Toaldo, a researcher at the European Council on Foreign Affairs in London, said Libya remained an alternative for extremists fighting with ISIL and others.
“The European intelligence services, starting with MI5 and MI6, now have lists focused on secondary territorial movement,” Mr Toaldo said. “Parts of Libya are seen as safe havens by foreign fighters who want to continue the battle.”
The Institute for the Study of War in Washington concluded in a recent report that ISIL’s “global attack network is now more robust, dispersed, and resilient than ever”.
European countries are struggling to find an effective way to handle the rise of extremism.
Emmanuel Macron’s government has announced plans to shut its only residential counter-extremism centre in Pontourny, west France, which opened in September last year to convince youth to change their views. With rooms for 25 people, it never held more than nine at a time.
Meanwhile the German newspaper Bild defied new mobile phone laws to show how easily ISIL can radicalise residents.
A reporter made contact with two handlers who told him to destroy his Simcard, pick up a replacement and communicate by the secure messaging app Wickr.
The message he received was incitement. “Go into a hospital, find the seriously ill and slaughter them,” wrote the contact in Syria. “Don’t plan too much, hit out quickly.”
In the race to keep ISIL operatives out of Britain, there is one underused power that could come to the fore, sources said.
Temporary exclusion orders allow the authorities to ban Britons from entering their own country unless they agree to join a deradicalisation programme or co-operate with a surveillance regime.
“I think we will see a series of announcements in the autumn,” Ms Stuart said.
There are believed to be at least 350 UK ISIL recruits still active in the region, but primed to come back