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Since 2011, large numbers of European Muslims have gone to Syria to fight with the rebels. But exactly how many are they, and which countries are providing most of the fighters? The question matters because some of these foreign fighters may return to perpetrate attacks in the West, and Western governments are now grappling with the question of how to design and calibrate countermeasures.
Assessing the terrorist threat to Europe from the foreign fighters in Syria is tricky. On the one hand, as I showed in an earlier study summarized here on the Monkey Cage, foreign fighters are much more likely to engage in international terrorism than the general Muslim population, and they produce more lethal attacks than do plotters without foreign fighting experience. On the other hand, only a small proportion of Western foreign fighters tend to come home to attack. Moreover, the return rate varies considerably between destinations; for example, Western foreign fighters in Pakistan have tended to return for plots more frequently than their counterparts in Somalia.
However, a prerequisite for any threat assessment is a decent estimate of the gross number of departing fighters. Knowing the return rate doesn’t help if we don’t know how many people left in the first place. One estimation strategy consists of collecting all conceivable types of open-source reports of foreign fighter flows, from individual martyrdom notices to aggregate estimates from the United Nations. Aaron Zelin and I have been doing this for the past 15 months, and this work-in-progress has yielded a collection of over 800 data points. This approach has many advantages – which we will highlight in future publications – but it is not ideal for producing comparable country-level estimates, because it includes observations of very different types.
Another strategy, which is simpler and more reliable – albeit more limited in scope – is to consider only a particular type of observation, namely, estimates provided by individual countries’ own intelligence services. Every now and then, government officials will mention such estimates in public, be it in unclassified reports, interviews with journalists or parliamentary hearings. Of course, these estimates are not unproblematic: They may vary in their accuracy and may have been generated in slightly different ways. Still, they are probably the best estimates available because security services have at their disposal a much wider range of collection tools than do academics, and because European agencies appear to have been tracking their respective foreign fighters closely since the start of the Syrian uprising.
To get a sense of the scale and distribution of foreign fighters from Europe, I collected national estimates provided by European intelligence services over the past 6-7 months. With the help of my assistant Kaja Blattmann, I found such numbers for 12 European countries. These are listed below in Table 1. For the countries that provided range estimates, I have used the minimum estimate and put the maximum estimate in parentheses.
Read complete article here Number of foreign fighters from Europe in Syria is historically unprecedented. Who should be worried?
Assessing the terrorist threat to Europe from the foreign fighters in Syria is tricky. On the one hand, as I showed in an earlier study summarized here on the Monkey Cage, foreign fighters are much more likely to engage in international terrorism than the general Muslim population, and they produce more lethal attacks than do plotters without foreign fighting experience. On the other hand, only a small proportion of Western foreign fighters tend to come home to attack. Moreover, the return rate varies considerably between destinations; for example, Western foreign fighters in Pakistan have tended to return for plots more frequently than their counterparts in Somalia.
However, a prerequisite for any threat assessment is a decent estimate of the gross number of departing fighters. Knowing the return rate doesn’t help if we don’t know how many people left in the first place. One estimation strategy consists of collecting all conceivable types of open-source reports of foreign fighter flows, from individual martyrdom notices to aggregate estimates from the United Nations. Aaron Zelin and I have been doing this for the past 15 months, and this work-in-progress has yielded a collection of over 800 data points. This approach has many advantages – which we will highlight in future publications – but it is not ideal for producing comparable country-level estimates, because it includes observations of very different types.
Another strategy, which is simpler and more reliable – albeit more limited in scope – is to consider only a particular type of observation, namely, estimates provided by individual countries’ own intelligence services. Every now and then, government officials will mention such estimates in public, be it in unclassified reports, interviews with journalists or parliamentary hearings. Of course, these estimates are not unproblematic: They may vary in their accuracy and may have been generated in slightly different ways. Still, they are probably the best estimates available because security services have at their disposal a much wider range of collection tools than do academics, and because European agencies appear to have been tracking their respective foreign fighters closely since the start of the Syrian uprising.
To get a sense of the scale and distribution of foreign fighters from Europe, I collected national estimates provided by European intelligence services over the past 6-7 months. With the help of my assistant Kaja Blattmann, I found such numbers for 12 European countries. These are listed below in Table 1. For the countries that provided range estimates, I have used the minimum estimate and put the maximum estimate in parentheses.
Read complete article here Number of foreign fighters from Europe in Syria is historically unprecedented. Who should be worried?
