WESTERN ISIL FIGHTERS DISILLUSIONED, TRYING TO GET HOME, DIPLOMATS SAY
BEIRUT Disenchanted Western ISIL fighters are increasingly appealing to their governments to help them return home, diplomats have reported.
As fighting around ISIL’s strongholds intensifies and the group loses vast swaths of territory, foreign jihadists are trying to defect in record numbers. More than 150 from six countries have in the last few months contacted their missions in Turkey, which neighbours the group’s territory in Syria and Iraq.
Western diplomats said they had received hushed phone calls from inside Raqqa — ISIL’s self-styled capital — and even messages smuggled out on scraps of paper, the Wall Street Journal reported.
It is thought up to 1,700 French jihadists have returned home from fighting in Syria and Iraq since 2012. Britain and Germany have seen about 800 each, a major cause for concern for European intelligence agencies.
“There are a lot of French people who are coming back,” France’s national intelligence co-ordinator, Didier le Bret, said recently. “They’ve got a feeling it’s not going that well.”
Most of the Paris attackers had trained in Syria and managed to return to Europe by posing as refugees.
Until Turkey closed its once-porous border with Syria earlier this year, foreign fighters had been able to move in and out of its territory with relative ease.