Despite US-led airstrikes, transnational Wahhabi and Deobandi fighters pouring Into Syria faster than ever
Top U.S. and British counterterrorism officials said Tuesday that the growing number and variety of foreign fighters streaming into Syria is unprecedented in recent history.
“The rate of travel into Syria [by foreign fighters] is greater than we saw into Afghanistan prior to 9/11,” Randy Blake, a senior strategic advisor in the U.S. Office of Director of National Intelligence, said Tuesday during a panel at the annual International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) conference in Orlando, Florida. “It’s greater than anything we’ve seen into Afghanistan, into Yemen, into Somalia, into Iraq, or anything that we’ve seen in the last 10-year period.”
Blake said the number of Westerners heading to Syria to fight has risen so rapidly in recent weeks that a new law enforcement video shown at the four-day event is already out of date.
“The video said there are somewhere around 12,000 foreign fighters in Syria. We would update that number to about 16,000 foreign fighters who have traveled to Syria from over 80 countries,” Blake said, adding that roughly 2,000 of those fighters hail from Western countries — including “at least 500 from the U.K, 700 from France, 400 from Germany, and more than 100 Americans [who] have traveled, or tried to travel into Syria.”
What’s more, authorities have found it nearly impossible to create a demographic profile of these Western volunteers.
“This particular conflict zone and this particular foreign fighter threat runs the gamut in terms of age,” said John Adams, the FBI’s deputy director for counterterrorism.
“We’re currently age-ranged from minors of 15 years old, which is our youngest traveler, up to 63 years old, which has been our oldest traveler. It’s very, very difficult to try and identify a particular age group that this particular foreign fighter message resonates with,” Adams said.
No one knows for sure what is motivating so many Westerners to head to Syria, but one U.S. official offered a personal theory.
“When we try and figure out: what is different about this foreign fighter foe? What separates this conflict from Afghanistan, from Somalia, from Bosnia?” asked Andrew McCabe, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office.
“To me, the instant appeal of participating in the caliphate that’s happening now, I think that resonates with our young people. “
“Our culture is one that grew up with instant gratification, instant information,” said McCabe. “Al Qaeda’s message has historically been, ‘This is a long war, we’ll fight the Great Satan [and] we’ll try and establish a caliphate sometime in the future.’ ISIL has come forward and said, ‘The time is now, it’s happening now. We have our own territory, come join us.’”
“And I think that’s one of the reasons [ISIL] has such magnetism for this at-risk population.”
John Noble, a veteran counterterrorism expert posted to the British Embassy in Washington, D.C, said he is most concerned with what happens when these fighters come home.
“Clearly the military action underway is a really important part of mitigating the threat [of ISIL],” Noble said. “But the reality is that the threat is going to be dealt with on the streets of Europe and on the streets of the United States.”
So far, at least a dozen U.S. residents have been grabbed at airports and borders as they tried to make their way to Syria to fight on the side of the most radical elements in the civil war against Bashar al-Assad. Those who have been prosecuted have been charged with giving material support to terrorist groups and there has been no indication that any of them wanted to return to the U.S. to carry out terrorist attacks. Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, says law enforcement is concerned that once in Syria or Iraq, radical jihadis will attempt to recruit them for such missions.
Suleimanagich, Kenny (206446232)Law enforcement sources tell NBC News that several other cases working their way through the system in various jurisdictions. The cases include American citizens who have actually made their way to the battlefields of Syria.
Although many Westerners have gone to Syria to fight for groups like al-Nusra and Ahrar ash-Sham, the success of ISIS –and the establishment of the caliphate — is now drawing fighters from those groups to the Islamic State, say U.S. intelligence officials. At least three Americans who went to Syria to join those groups were later killed while fighting on behalf of ISIS.
Law enforcement sources tell NBC News that several other cases working their way through the system in various jurisdictions. The cases include American citizens who have actually made their way to the battlefields of Syria.
Although many Westerners have gone to Syria to fight for groups like al-Nusra and Ahrar ash-Sham, the success of ISIS –and the establishment of the caliphate — is now drawing fighters from those groups to the Islamic State, say U.S. intelligence officials. At least three Americans who went to Syria to join those groups were later killed while fighting on behalf of ISIS.
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More than 1,000 foreign fighters are streaming into Syria each month, a rate that has so far been unchanged by airstrikes against the Islamic State and efforts by other countries to stem the flow of departures, according to U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials.
The magnitude of the ongoing migration suggests that the U.S.-led air campaign has neither deterred significant numbers of militants from traveling to the region nor triggered such outrage that even more are flocking to the fight because of American intervention.
“The flow of fighters making their way to Syria remains constant, so the overall number continues to rise,” a U.S. intelligence official said. U.S. officials cautioned, however, that there is a lag in the intelligence being examined by the CIA and other spy agencies, meaning it could be weeks before a change becomes apparent.
The trend line established over the past year would mean that the total number of foreign fighters in Syria exceeds 16,000, and the pace eclipses that of any comparable conflict in recent decades, including the 1980s war in Afghanistan.
U.S. officials have attributed the flows to a range of factors, including the sophisticated recruiting campaigns orchestrated by groups in Syria such as the Islamic State and the relative ease with which militants from the Middle East, North Africa and Europe can make their way to that country.
American officials stressed that the stability of the flow is not seen as a measure of the effectiveness of an air campaign that expanded beyond Iraq and into Syria late last month. The latest estimates indicate that strikes in Syria alone have killed about 460 members of the Islamic State — the group that has beheaded two American journalists and two British aid workers — as well as about 60 fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate.
The United States and its allies have carried out more than 600 strikes so far in Syria and Iraq, bombings aimed primarily at slowing the Islamic State’s advances and allowing the Iraqi military and moderate opposition forces in Syria to regroup. Rear Adm. John Kirby, spokesman for the Pentagon, said this week that the strikes are “disrupting” the Islamic State’s operations but acknowledged that any major offensive against the group “may still be a ways off.”
Experts said the foreign fighter population is likely to grow significantly larger as the three-year-old conflict drags on.
“I don’t think 15,000 really scratches the surface yet,” said Andrew Liepman, a counterterrorism expert at Rand Corp. who formerly was the deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
Since the start of the U.S.-led air campaign, analysts have sought to track whether the bombings would discourage would-be fighters or serve as a rallying cry for Islamists. Liepman said the steady numbers could mean that neither has occurred or, more likely, that both have happened to degrees that offset one another.
The air campaign “has probably discouraged some people and encouraged others,” Liepman said.
He and others cautioned, however, that there are significant gaps in U.S. intelligence on the conflict in Syria, making it difficult to have a clear understanding of the scale and composition of the swelling population of foreign fighters.
The vast majority of those militants have come from other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Tunisia has sent more fighters to Syria than any other nation.
More than 2,000 fighters have come from countries in Europe, carrying passports that would enable them to travel relatively freely in Western countries.
Many went to fight the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and may pose no security threat beyond that country’s civil war. But security officials have expressed mounting concern over more recent arrivals who have fought with the Islamic State or al-Nusra, which has a cell near Aleppo that was established to plot attacks against Western nations.
Britain, France, Germany and other European nations have taken increasingly aggressive measures over the past year to stem the flow of fighters to Syria, seizing passports, passing new antiterrorism measures and targeting suspects with stepped-up surveillance and arrests. U.S. officials have said that about 130 Americans have traveled to Syria or tried to do so.
Most militants entering Syria have done so through Turkey, a country that has recently sought to tighten control over its borders and root out Islamist networks that serve as pipelines for fighter.
U.S. officials said it could be too soon to see clear indications that such measures are working.
“The Europeans and other allies are taking steps upstream to stem the flow of their citizens to Syria, while at the downstream end, the Turks are taking action to keep their borders from being exploited by jihadists,” the U.S. intelligence official said. “It could take some time for the dampening effect of these measures to start showing up in the foreign-fighter intelligence estimates.”
Although U.S. officials have not made public estimates of the rate at which foreign Wahabi/Deobandi fighters are flowing into Syria, they have provided totals that trace a clear trajectory. The 15,000 figure cited by the White House last month was up sharply from an estimate of 12,000 in July and 7,000 in March.
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