Foreign Fighters: preventative action (UK mainly)

[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