Today's Wild Geese: Foreign Fighters in the GWOT

[davidbfpo]

A lengthy BBC article by a SME, Lorenzo Vidino, which tries to describe and assess the problem many countries face.

For the UK he writes:

The head of the UK security service MI5 said this week that fewer than expected of the 800 Britons who joined IS had returned recently and that at least 130 had been killed....The UK Home Office, for example, disclosed last year that of the 400 British foreign fighters who had returned from Syria and Iraq, only 54 were convicted.

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-41679377

[davidbfpo]

Rory Stewart is a junior UK minister, for international development, but is very media savvy and has experience in Afghanistan & Iraq (he even has his own thread at:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ad.php?t=10832 ).

From his radio interview yesterday, which officials said was in line with government policy:

They are absolutely dedicated, as members of the Islamic State, towards the creation of a caliphate. They believe in an extremely hateful doctrine which involves killing themselves, killing others and trying to use violence and brutality to create an 8th Century, or 7th Century, state. So I'm afraid we have to be serious about the fact these people are a serious danger to us, and unfortunately, the only way of dealing with them will be, in almost every case, to kill them.

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-41717394

[davidbfpo]

The Soufan Group and another group led by Richard Barrett (ex-SIS & UN CT) have published an updated report (41 pgs) 'Beyond the Caliphate: Foreign Fighters and the Threat of Returnees'. There is a five point summary on pg.5.

Link:http://thesoufancenter.org/wp-conten...tober-2017.pdf

Short of time? Try this:https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-...-the-thousands

Or this podcast interview (3 mns) of Richard Barrett:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R-c...ature=youtu.be

A graphic via Twitter below:

[davidbfpo]

A free article from the Journal of Forensic Sciences, part of the EU-funded PRIME project on Lone Actors by some academic experts. Which I have not read.

The Abstract:

This article provides an in-depth assessment of lone actor terrorists’ attack planning and preparation. A codebook of 198 variables related to different aspects of pre-attack behavior is applied to a sample of 55 lone actor terrorists. Data were drawn from open-source materials and complemented where possible with primary sources. Most lone actors are not highly lethal or surreptitious attackers. They are generally poor at maintaining operational security, leak their motivations and capabilities in numerous ways, and generally do so months and even years before an attack. Moreover, the “loneness” thought to define this type of terrorism is generally absent; most lone actors uphold social ties that are crucial to their adoption and maintenance of the motivation and capability to commit terrorist violence. The results offer concrete input for those working to detect and prevent this form of terrorism and argue for a re-evaluation of the “lone actor” concept.

Link:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...029.13676/full

[davidbfpo]

Richard Barrett of The Soufan Group, had another article three weeks and the focus is on the UK.
Link:https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...gislamic-state

Recently Max Hill, the UK's Independent Reviewer of CT Law, became controversial to some over his reported remarks on how to deal with returnees, in essence not all of them can be prosecuted so we must have other options. He was recently at a conference and the next article summarises his contribution.
Link:https://www.connectfutures.org/kill-...r-lynn-davies/

[davidbfpo]

Recommended by Professor Bruce Hoffman via Twitter. First a long Buzzfeed report on the smuggling along the Turkish border:

US officials say most of ISIS fighters have died on the battlefield. Smugglers along the Syria-Turkey border say many have escaped.

Link:https://www.buzzfeed.com/mikegiglio/...haps-to-fight?

Secondly, a wider international viewpoint on the "hot potato" by a NDU staffer; which opens with an editorial passage:

As the Caliphate collapses, many of its foreign volunteers are fleeing Iraq and Syria. A lot of ink has been spilled (some by me, in fact) on the problem of foreign fighters returning home. However, some of these fighters end up in a third country—not in the Caliphate, but not home either—that is not prepared for the problem.

Link:https://lawfareblog.com/foreign-fighter-hot-potato

[davidbfpo]

I rarely spot anything from Stratfor these days, but this one landed today. It is a point of view and ends with:

Without combatting their narrative assertions about the legitimacy of western legal systems and processes, much of our military success could be nullified.

Link:https://marcom.stratfor.com/horizons...ing-propaganda