They were going to fight motivated by a sense of injustice, a driving sense of religious duty or a desire to defend the Syrian people. For some, the motivation to go and fight was ideologically pure and focused abroad. What these individuals will do is going to be determined in large part by their reasons for going to Syria in the first place.
Even according to Andrew Parker’s latest figures, at least a few hundred are still out on the loose somewhere. But there is still an important question to be asked about what is going to happen to those individuals who went abroad to fight. A threat abroad appears to be decreasing (through loss of territory, capability and manpower) just as a different sort of threat is expressing itself at home. This helps explain the picture that we are seeing at the moment. Instead, a community of frustrated travellers is developing around the world, at a moment when the ideology and methodology of what constitutes a terrorist attack has become diffuse to the point that it is indistinguishable from random acts of social violence.
What has changed, however, is the nature of the threat back home, where we continue to see individuals being mobilized by extreme ideologies but finding it harder to travel. This clearly lacks much connection with reality, where we can see that the group has been consistently shouting, directing and instigating terrorist plots in the West for the past three years. The notion of an uptick in threat from foreign fighters after the collapse of the Caliphate was predicated on the notion that Isil was somehow holding themselves back – saving the potential strikes back home until they were at their weakest point. In some ways this lack of a sudden surge is not surprising. Rather than the individuals who went off to fight in Syria and Iraq, the threat comes from individuals who are still at home. Since the beginning of the year, the UK has faced five successful terrorist attacks – and yet, with the possible exception of the Manchester bombing, none have involved foreign fighters. Isil’s loss of territory has not produced the surge in terrorist plots that was expected. This dissonant set of messages highlights the degree to which the terrorist threat that the UK is facing has transformed.įrom a terrifying but comprehensible phenomenon directed by surreptitious foreign networks, we are now facing a confusing and diffuse one whose link to terrorist organisations is ever looser. On the same day that Raqqa fell, the head of MI5 Andrew Parker gave a set of interviews in which he talks about facing the most severe threat that he has seen in his over three decades working in the intelligence agencies. Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale.International Center for the Study of Radicalisation.Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
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