Thanks To Easy Policies, The Largest Percentage Of Foreign Fighters Return Home To The U.K.
According to a recent report from Europol, nearly half of British citizens who traveled to Iraq and Syria to fight and train with ISIS have returned to the United Kingdom and are “exceptionally dangerous”.
45% of Britain’s Islamist foreign fighters returned back to the U.K. – the largest proportion of returned jihadists out of any place in the EU.
Europol’s report states:
Those that have returned garner kudos with like-minded individuals. Their training and experience — such as handling weapons and explosives — makes them exceptionally dangerous. Furthermore, EU Member States’ ongoing concern is that these individuals can perpetuate and strengthen their networks both nationally and internationally.
Statistics from the Europol report reveal that Britain had the highest number of completed, failed, or foiled attacks in 2018 across the entire EU. Britain also holds the second-highest number of arrests for terrorist activities at 273. France holds the highest with 310 arrests.
On top of that, as reported by The Telegraph, out of the 400 jihadists returned to the U.K., only 40 have been prosecuted for terrorist activities.
In 2017, Director of Public Prosecutions Max Hill QC said that British authorities weren’t prosecuting a large number of returning jihadists, and that authorities should instead look towards “reintegration”.
Hill also claimed that many who went to fight for the Islamic State may have been young adults who “traveled out of a sense of naivety, possibly with some brainwashing along the way”. Hill also specified that prosecuting all British jihadists would risk “losing a generation”.
Europol also claims ISIS may start recruiting women to the frontline of their jihadist movement – describing that female radical Islamists are just “as ideologically motivated as their male counterparts” and that radicalized women “are willing to use violence if the ideology allows them to do so”.
After a certain point and many instances of authorities in the United Kingdom ignoring the actual dangers associated with refugees and migrants and focusing their attention elsewhere, one must wonder whether or not it’s truly ignorance or actually willful disregard of the situation at hand.
The United Kingdom may be under siege – but officials and politicians may also have a suicidal death wish for the country as a whole. The blatant disregard of sovereign citizens and their safety is hard to write off as otherwise.