JOIN USEuropean countries pressed ahead on Tuesday with efforts to deter the growing numbers of their citizens seeking to join radical Islamic movements in Iraq and Syria, as some experts warned that the US-led military campaign against the Islamic State increased the risk that the groups would turn their attention to attacks on Western targets.
France’s interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, promoting legislation to address the problem, said the number of French citizens who had travelled to fight in the region, or planned to travel there, had grown 74 per cent this year, to about 1,000. About 350 French citizens are currently on the ground there, he estimated, including 60 women.
His British counterpart, Home Secretary Theresa May, told her party conference that she wanted new powers to prevent those suspected of Islamic radicalism from using social media. She wanted the police be given power to seize passports at the border from Britons suspected of travelling to join Islamic radicals.
She said that a future Conservative government would ban extremist groups and further restrict the movement and access to the Internet of those suspected of having radical intentions or of proselytising extremist views.
Already this year, May said, she had stripped the passports of 25 Britons who had travelled or planned to travel to Syria and the police had arrested more than 100 people for “offences relating to terrorism in Syria.”
She said “at least 500 British nationals” have gone to Syria and Iraq, although that appears to be a number that officials have used for months. “Most of those British fighters are likely to return” home, she said, raising the potential, at least, for further domestic terrorism.
Peter Neumann, director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College, London, said the potential for new violence in Europe had increased.
The concerns “are not bigger because the number of jihadis are increasing — which has been happening for months — but because it’s clearer that with the Western intervention, the attention of the jihadis is increasingly turning to the West,” he said.
“Most of the jihadi groups were not interested in attacking the West, but now it has become a priority for them. It is because of the changing nature of the conflict, and it is probably happening quicker than what everyone expected.”
Further, Neumann said, having a Western enemy is serving to unite rival groups like the Islamic State and the Nusra Front, which is affiliated with al-Qaida. “Western involvement has excited people, and the 'Islam versus the West’ does create excitement, not only in Europe but also in places like Tunisia where recruitment is up because of that,” he said.
Britain carried out its first airstrikes against Islamic State fighters in Iraq on Tuesday, the defence ministry said. Five Arab states, plus France, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark, have also signed on to the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State, which has assembled thousands of radical fighters and seized territory in Iraq and Syria.
May said the authorities needed to begin at home. “The first thing we must do is discourage young British Muslims from travelling to Syria and Iraq in the first place,” she said, but that is hardly easy, and it does not seem to be working very well, especially after the group declared itself a caliphate.
Even now, British police are trying to track down a 15-year-old girl from Bristol who they believe traveled to Istanbul with a 17-year-old girl from London with the intention of entering Syria to join the Islamic State.
An assistant chief constable, Louisa Rolfe, said there were indications that the Bristol girl “may have been radicalised.” There would be no penalties for the girls, but for adults, May said, it is illegal to fight for terrorist groups.
Belgium, another member of the anti-Islamic State coalition, has been a prime recruiting area for jihadists. In Antwerp on Tuesday, the trial continued of 46 members of Sharia4Belgium, a radical Muslim organisation accused of recruiting volunteers to fight in Syria. Of the group, nine are believed to be dead and 29 are in Syria, according to the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, which called the case “the most important terrorist trial that Belgium has ever witnessed.”
Targeting Internet providers
At least 300 Belgians have left for Syria, May said, along with 400 Germans. About 800 Russians are believed to be fighting in the region, along with 60 Australians, and at least 80 Swedes, 50 Norwegians and 70 Danes, according to estimates from various centres that study the topic. There are also fighters from Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.
Already, according to Neumann, about 40 per cent of the 30,000 Islamic State fighters are foreign, though many of them are non-European. About 20 per cent of the Nusra Front’s 10,000 fighters are foreign.
In France, Cazeneuve told Le Journal du Dimanche that 36 French citizens had died in the region, and that some returning jihadists boast about what they have done and “say they are ready to leave again.”
Both May and Cazeneuve spoke of working with Muslim communities to defeat the temptation of radicalization and understand how they can help needy civilians in Iraq and Syria without travelling there.
First, Cazeneuve said, France must “stop people from leaving because those who leave and come back, they come back after having seen executions, beheadings, crucifixions. They’ve lost their bearings, they are extraordinarily violent, and represent a real potential of risk for the country when they come back.”
Those who return, he said, “must immediately be reported,” and France is working with Turkey, Britain and other European allies to identify returning fighters, including the use of a new alert for “foreign fighters” in the European Union’s border control computer system.
But the concentration on deterrence also presents strong risks of violations of civil liberties and individual rights. The Conservatives’ coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats, defended their opposition to some of May’s measures, saying that they would “continue to oppose the Tories’ obsessive intrusion into people’s lives.”
A Conservative legislator, Dominic Raab, said that there was already a lot of legislation to prosecute extremist groups. “I think you need to be very wary about criminalising thoughts and views,” he said.