Over half of world’s nations producing Islamist terrorists

NEW YORK — More than half of the world’s countries are now producing jihadis to fill the ranks of violent Sunni terrorist organisations in the Middle East, a United Nations report showed.

The Al Qaeda network and its schismatic rival, the Islamic State have seen more than 25,000 mujahideen (guerilla fighters) join them in recent years, it states, creating an “unprecedented” threat to national and international security in both the “immediate and long-term” that most governments have failed to grasp the significance of so far.

The report — prepared by the UN Security Council’s special permanent committee for monitoring violent Islamism — amounts to one of the most bleak and comprehensive assessments of the global foreign fighter phenomenon compiled yet. Its findings are based on “robust and detailed” evidence from 27 intelligence and security services spread across UN member states, its authors state.

“What has changed over the past three years is the scale of the problem. The overall numbers have risen sharply, from a few thousand foreign terrorist fighters a decade ago,” the authors say. “The number of countries of origin has also significantly increased ... from a small group of countries ... to more than 100 member states, including countries that have never experienced problems with groups associated with Al Qaeda.”

“The trend line remains worrying,” the report adds, noting a 70 per cent increase in the total number of foreign fighters since March last year. The problem is overwhelmingly focused on Iraq and Syria.

Two member states with “global assessment capabilities” told the Security Council committee they estimated more than 22,000 and more than 20,000 foreign fighters respectively had travelled to fight for Al Qaeda linked jihadist groups there in the wake of the Arab spring. Turkey is still the primary country through which foreign fighters are gaining access to both countries, the report says.

The Syrian and Iraq theatre is “a veritable international finishing school for extremists”, the report says, similar to that seen in Afghanistan in the 1990s, where Al Qaeda was hot housed, but on a far greater scale.

“Those who eat together and bond together can bomb together”, it notes.

Unlike in Afghanistan, where foreign fighters tended to stick together in their own ethnic groups, in Syria and Iraq jihadis are far more closely integrated into more developed and sophisticated networks.

The international response to the problem has so far been inadequate, the committee has told the Security Council. The main obstacle to successfully curbing the foreign fighter problem is greater intelligence sharing, its report says.

“Less than 10 per cent of basic identifying information has made it into global multilateral systems to date.”

The problem is particularly evident among European member states. The report says timely and detailed information is often provided to governments of “transit states”, such as Turkey, too late too be effective.

The Turkish government has a 12,500-name watchlist, according to the UN, but is still unable to act as swiftly as it might because of inadequate cooperation with jihadis’ countries of origin. THE FINANCIAL TIMES