US Chief of Staff: Foreign terrorists still flock towards Syria through Turkey

NEWS DESK

The US Chief of Staff Joseph Dunford warned that other foreign fighters still join IS mercenaries in Syria, noting that their number reaches about 100 per month.

Although the areas under the control of IS terrorists have shrunk considerably, new fighters still flock towards Syria to join IS mercenaries, most of them arrive at Syria through the Turkish border according to Dunford.

The number of foreign fighters who joined IS peaked three years ago when their number reached 1,500 new fighters a month.

On Tuesday, Dunford pointed out during his speech in the opening of a conference about fighting the violent extremism to the influx of foreign fighters to join IS, the ability to transfer resources and the ideology that allows these gangs to work.

Dunford added, “The influx of foreign fighters is complicating the crisis more and more, especially with regard to the handling of foreign detained fighters who are rejected by their native countries, noting that the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) hold more than 700 IS mercenaries from about 40 countries.”

“The repatriation of these fighters has been delayed because of political considerations and inconsistent legal frameworks,” Dunford said.

For example, Britain refused to return two men of IS to the country as they were within a gang known as the Beatles which was responsible for kidnapping, torturing and cutting the heads of a number of foreigners, including two journalists, and stripped them of their nationality.

The United States has returned an American IS mercenary for trial, but the fate of nobody who has been being held in Syria or Iraq has been disclosed.

Dunford said that the failure to deal properly with the foreign fighters who had been captured would make it difficult to eliminate the attractiveness of Daesh's ideology.

Dunford added that the decisive factor is to determine the foreign fighters, try them and take them away from extremism saying, “We need to find a way to confront this challenge and prevent the detainees from becoming leaders of extremist organizations in the future.”
D.H