Half of UK’S Isil jihadists unaccounted for, minister admits

HUNDREDS of British jihadists who travelled to the Middle East to fight for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) and other terrorist groups have fallen off the radar, the security minister has admitted.

Ben Wallace said that around half of the estimated 850 people from the UK who went to Syria and Iraq have returned home, but ministers “don’t know where” the rest of them have ended up. Up to one in five are thought to have been killed in the fighting, with a small number crossing the border into Turkey, but a “significant number” remain unaccounted for.

Isil lost much of its territory in Syria and Iraq last year, including Mosul, its stronghold in northern Iraq, and Raqqa, its Syrian headquarters.

The Syrian Defence Force, backed by a Us-led coalition, has forced Isil back into a strip of the Euphrates valley. Mr Wallace denied that the authorities had “lost track” of the British jihadists, but admitted they had “dispersed”.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “They went into a very hard part of Syria to reach, into the Euphrates valley, and then were dispersed from there. What we do know is about half have come back to the United Kingdom of the original 850-odd that went out.

“About 15 per cent to 20 per cent we think have died out there in military action, and at the moment we are seeing in dribs and drabs some of them coming into Turkey, maybe some of them trying to get back to us here, but there’s a significant number that, at the moment, it is hard to actually tie down exactly where they are.”

The bodies of British jihadists killed in Syria are unlikely to be identified, as doing so is not a priority for Bashar alassad, the Syrian president. In October, Rory Stewart, the international development minister, said nearly all of the British jihadists in Syria would have to be killed to protect the UK.