ISIS fighters not flooding back home to wreak havoc as feared
THE HAGUE, Netherlands — As recently as a year ago, the United States and other Western counterterrorism officials feared 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 Raqqa, Syria.
Now, those cities have fallen to American-backed forces, but the number of combat-hardened returnees has been much smaller than anticipated, if still worrisome, counterterrorism officials said. 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 Raqqa, 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,” Lt. Gen. Kenneth F. 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, U.S. officials said. 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, the 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 said.
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 Raqqa and Mosul. Since the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 and Brussels last year, European nations have tightened border security and increased surveillance.
“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.”