"And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness, the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us. But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief. "

Khalil Gibran (How I Became a Madman)

Lübnan Marunîleri / Yasin Atlıoğlu

NEWS AND ARTICLES / HABERLER VE MAKALELER

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Number of foreign fighters from Europe in Syria is historically unprecedented. Who should be worried?- The Washington Post


Since 2011, large numbers of European Muslims have gone to Syria to fight with the rebels. But exactly how many are they, and which countries are providing most of the fighters? The question matters because some of these foreign fighters may return to perpetrate attacks in the West, and Western governments are now grappling with the question of how to design and calibrate countermeasures.
Assessing the terrorist threat to Europe from the foreign fighters in Syria is tricky. On the one hand, as I showed in an earlier study summarized here on the Monkey Cage, foreign fighters are much more likely to engage in international terrorism than the general Muslim population, and they produce more lethal attacks than do plotters without foreign fighting experience. On the other hand, only a small proportion of Western foreign fighters tend to come home to attack. Moreover, the return rate varies considerably between destinations; for example, Western foreign fighters in Pakistan have tended to return for plots more frequently than their counterparts in Somalia.