Dramatic rise in number of jihadis, says UN report

There are more than 25,000 foreign fighters from 100 countries taking part in conflicts in Syria and Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya – an increase of 71 per cent since mid-2014, according to a UN panel report.

The total “has risen sharply from a few thousand ... a decade ago to more than 25,000 today,” it says.

The largest number, 20,000, have gone to fight with Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria and Iraq. Hundreds have deployed to each of the other Arab states, the Sahel countries in north Africa and Pakistan and 6,500 to Afghanistan.

The UN panel, comprising experts monitoring sanctions against al-Qaeda, says the scale of the problem has ballooned over the past three years and the flow of foreign jihadis “is higher than it has ever been”.

The number of countries has also soared from a small group in the 1990s to more than 100 today, including large numbers of fighters from Tunisia, France, Morocco, Russia and France. Recruits have also arrived from the Maldives, Finland, the Philippines, Trinidad and Tobago.

‘Finishing school’

The thousands of foreign jihadis fighting in Syria are dwelling and operating in “a veritable international finishing school for extremists”, the experts say, making the comparison with the dispersal of mujahideen (holy warriors) following the 1979-89 war in Afghanistan, subsequent internal conflicts and the war against the US-led coalition.

Jihadis who returned home to Algeria mounted a 10-year civil conflict and those who went to Egypt staged attacks against the government.

Others travelled to Bosnia to fight alongside fellow Muslims against the Orthodox Christian Serbs or to Somalia, Yemen, and other crisis-ridden countries. Thousands flowed into Iraq following the 2003 US invasion and occupation, and fought with the branch of al-Qaeda that gave birth to Islamic State and al-Nusra.

The routing of IS and al-Nusra in Iraq and Syria could have the unintended consequence of scattering extremist jihadis across the globe, the panel warns. Because of the ease of world travel, anyone could become a victim because attackers could target hotels, public facilities and gatherings.

Jihadis, their organisations and their networks “pose an immediate and long-term threat [and] an urgent global security problem” that needs to be addressed and does not lend itself to simple solutions, the panel says. The response needs to “be measured, effective and proportionate”.

The panel called for greater intelligence sharing and co-ordination among governments to identify foreign fighters and cited the negative impact of social media which link “diverse foreign fighters from different communities across the globe”.