Akil Awan writes for The National Interest on how we might deal with foreign fighters, returning home after fighting in Syria and Iraq with outfits like ISIS:
What Happens When ISIS Comes Home?
This week, President Barack Obama chaired a special meeting of the UN Security Council in which member states passed a resolution establishing an international legal framework to help prevent the recruitment and transport of would-be foreign fighters from joining terrorist groups. As expected, United Nations Security Council Resolution 2148 on Foreign Terrorist Fighters passed unanimously.
Hardly surprising, considering the alacrity and sheer audacity with which ISIS continues to expand in Syria and Iraq, drawing foreigners from every corner of the globe, willing to fight and die for its nascent Caliphate. Indeed, some estimates place the number of foreign fighters within ISIS at around 12,000 individuals, originating from no less than eighty-one different countries; a truly globalized mobilization on an epic scale.
As realization gradually dawns upon the international community of the grave consequences for both state and society, should citizens decide to take up arms with brutal and extreme outfits like ISIS, many countries have scrambled to instate strategies for dealing with not just the recruitment of fighters, but also the inevitable influx of returnees once the conflict is over.
Fighters returning from the front lines, brutalized by the ravages of war and potentially suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, may prove incapable of easily slipping back into their respective host societies. More ominously, some will also have engaged in horrific sectarian violence or egregious human-rights violations that have become hallmarks of the conflict.
The social media accounts of some Western Jihadists, tweeting images of grisly executions and “selfies” with severed heads, or the prominence of individuals like Jihadi John, the Briton who was shown brutally beheading American and British hostages, is testament to the barbarity many fighters have not just been immersed within, but have positively relished. Naturally, these revelations will prove all the more troubling, should these men choose to return home. Indeed, a small minority may have already brought violence back with them, as the recent example of Mehdi Nemmouche clearly shows; Nemmouche spent more than a year fighting in Syria and is now the prime suspect in an anti-Semitic attack on a Jewish museum in Belgium that left four people dead in May.
How then, should states deal with their errant sons, who choose to return home once the conflict has lost its glamour and appeal?
Read on here