A time-bombed Explosive Belt!
“Syria’s transformation into the centre of gravity for international terrorists is becoming a frightening reality,” Alexander Lukashevich, the Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesman underscored according to RIA Novosti News Agency. Unfortunately, the anti-Syria ewes, petrodollars, and some occidental countries, particularly the US, France and Britain, not to mention the neighbouring Turkey, have been, and even before the start of current crisis in Syria, providing every military and logistic support to extremists and dispatching thousands of hired killers and terrorists to tens of affiliated takfiri terrorist organizations in Syria.
Syria has so far supplied the UN with scores of lists documenting hundreds of foreign terrorists’ names, who where captured, wounded or killed in Syria. The UN remained silent and just on the contrary tried to blame the Syrians and their hero Army because they didn’t give the terrorists an opportunity to kill and slaughter them!
According to a year-long survey by King’s College London of more than two hundred killed posts on jihadist-linked websites and hundreds of Arab and western press reports found that up to 600 individuals from 14 countries including the UK, Austria, Spain, Sweden and Germany had taken part in the conflict since it began in 2011. The largest contingent, the study found, came from the UK, with estimates of fighters running between 28 and 134. The figures for Belgium, the Netherlands and Ireland, considering their population, with about 200 fighters between them, made these countries the most significant, said Prof Peter Neumann from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King’s College,.
European fighters made up to between 7% and 11% of the foreign contingent in Syria, which ranged between 2,000 and 5,500 people. The researchers at the College also said there were likely to be at least 110 named Europeans engaged in fighting currently. They found that between 30 and 92 fighters were from France, between 14 and 85 from Belgium and between five and 107 from the Netherlands. Other nations in the study included Albania, Finland and Kosovo.
“No one has really mapped it out across all of Europe,” Neumann said. “We’ve brought all these figures together … it’s a compilation of the open source data. We can say with certainty now that hundreds of Europeans have joined the fight in Syria.” Neumann said the figures, though relatively small, showed how fast international jihadists had been mustered in response to the conflict. And as the unfolding of events on the ground revealed, this number of 600 is indeed more in at least 10 times.
“The mobilisation of this conflict is more significant than any of the recent conflicts we have known about,” he said. “The numbers are still quite small in terms of the overall percentage but in absolute numbers. I think it is higher now than any other conflict since Iraq. But Iraq went on for years and years. But here we have in the space of a year effectively – since early 2012 – you can already speak of thousands of foreign fighters. In Iraq that took two or three years to reach that point; so it is really significant.”
Neumann concluded that in light of the findings it was wrong for the UK government to focus on Mali and the Sahel region, saying:” We have been so preoccupied with Mali … the real story is Syria because people aren’t going to the Sahara. If you put yourself in the mind of a jihadist, you want to fight in the heart of the Arab world.” Actually, a number of those extremist terrorists who might survive the Syrian hero Army bullets would definitely return back to their friends, neighbours and families; but this time with a time-bombed explosive belt!
Dr. Mohammad Abdo Al-Ibrahim