Well over 20,000 foreign terrorist fighters are still alive in Syria and Iraq, while the number of those who are going to continue to pose a threat in future is very problematic, the coordinator of the UN Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team concerning ISIL, Al-Qaida (both banned in Russia) and Taliban, Edmund Fitton-Brown, told Sputnik in an interview
GENOA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 08th November, 2019) Well over 20,000 foreign terrorist fighters are still alive in Syria and Iraq, while the number of those who are going to continue to pose a threat in future is very problematic, the coordinator of the UN Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team concerning ISIL, Al-Qaida (both banned in Russia) and Taliban, Edmund Fitton-Brown, told Sputnik in an interview.
"It's certainly true that Iraq and Syria generated the biggest amount of foreign terrorist fighters that we have ever seen, like numbers were significantly more than 40,000. We try to calculate, based on member state information, an approximate attrition rate of how many have been killed, and based on a very approximate calculation, sort of building upon what the experiences of different member states are. We're pretty confident that the number of still alive is well over a half, so we're talking about well over 20,000 people, and some people put that estimate above 25,000," Fitton-Brown said.
He noted that some of them would end up serving long prison sentences in Iraq, Syria, Turkey or their countries of origin, but also that many would serve out short sentences and then be released.
"And some of them may be impossible to prosecute, some of them may evade capture and prosecution altogether. So you have to ask yourself a question of what will these people be doing in five years time, 10 years time and more," he continued.
"People sometimes talk about something called a blowback ratio, which is the proportion of people who go as foreign terrorist fighters and then subsequently haven't got it out of their system and decide to continue their struggle somewhere else, either going into another conflict zone or becoming terrorists in some non-conflict zone. And even if you estimate that ratio very low, the numbers we are talking about mean that there is still a very problematic number of people who are going to continue to pose a threat in the future," Fitton-Brown said.
Apart from the direct threat from the foreign fighters, there remains the generational aspect of the problem, according to the UN team coordinator. As an example, he mentioned an Indonesian fighter, killed in Syria in 2018, who was five years old at the time when his father was involved in the 2002 Bali bombings.
"It's so illustrative of the generational nature of this problem. We had this problem with Afghanistan, but the numbers were much smaller. So, the international community must do better this time, otherwise it's going to fall to our children and our successors to deal with a problem that's being made now," he continued.
