Foreign Fighters: preventative action (UK mainly)

[davidbfpo]

A short BBC radio programme (38 mins) by Gordon Corera, in part explained as:

Gordon Corera explores the British government's response to managing returnees. In the last two years Britain has brought in temporary exclusion orders and is able to confiscate passports to prevent people preparing to travel to Syria.

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0742hlf

[davidbfpo]

A short video (12 mins) about five boys - three of them brothers - who left Brighton (UK) to Syria:

Mark Townsend asks why....... to join an al-Qaida affiliated group. What clues were missed? What was it about them that should have alerted the authorities to their potential radicalisation?

Link:http://www.theguardian.com/world/vid...to-syria-video

There is a longer written "long read". On a first glance I do wonder if this is actually true:

Their journey from the south coast to Syria cannot be reduced to a single factor, but it involves racist abuse, allegations of police neglect, and the collective failure of numerous authorities – both those charged with protecting vulnerable young people, and those charged with preventing radicalisation.

Link:http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2...to-jihad-syria

What about the factors that persuaded them to go? Brighton can in places be wealthy and has a strong gay community - which may be a factor, not mentioned in the article.

[davidbfpo]

Catching up on my reading I found this early December 2017 article by Shashank Joshi (ex-RUSI), written after the brand new Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson call the day before:

A dead terrorist can’t cause any harm to Britain....I do not believe that any terrorist, whether they come from this country or any other, should ever be allowed back into this country. We should do everything we can do to destroy and eliminate that threat.

Link to Joshi's article:https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ary-not-simple

Link to the report on the Defence Secretary comments:https://www.theguardian.com/politics...vin-williamson

The big snag for the UK is that IIRC four hundred suspected fighters have returned already; a figure officials now cite. Only a fraction have been arrested and prosecuted.

[davidbfpo]

Raffaello Pantucci, from RUSI, prompted by two high-profile cases, involving lone extreme right wingers in the past week, reminds us to be blunt they talk or announce their intentions beforehand:

Preventing terror attacks by lone individuals poses a serious challenge. But there are sometimes behaviours and actions that might give them away....Our research suggests that, more often than not, lone actors imagine that they belong to a wider movement – sometimes attending group activities such as rallies and conducting online research....Individuals had leaked information about their plans in about half of all cases.

Link:https://raffaellopantucci.com/2018/0...sts-give-away/

The article refers to a RUSI project for the details:https://rusi.org/publication/occasio...m-final-report

[davidbfpo]

An academic article behind a pay-wall, but the Abstract is free and with my emphasis:

How long does it typically take a returned foreign fighter to launch a domestic terror attack? The issue of returnees, and appropriate national and international responses to potential threats, has become a preeminent security concern of the 2010s, impacting policies on everything from refugees to whether to permit ISIS fighters to leave the theater of conflict alive. This article attempts to illuminate these contentious debates through a new data set of Lags in Attack Times of Extremist Returnees (LATER) that examines 230 jihadi returnees to Western countries. The data indicate that the majority of attempted attacks occur within one year, with a median lag time of just four months. Prison appears to play no role in lag times. Our findings indicate that security and reintegration efforts should be targeted within the critical six months after return, which diminishes the risk of attack considerably.

Link:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/...N_Paus.twitter