The High Cost of Defeating the Islamic State

U.N.: A military defeat of the Islamic State in Syria and

Iraq could scatter extremists around the globe.

BY COLUM LYNCH-MAY 29, 2015

This story was updated
Would the world be a safer place if the United States and its allies were to defeat the
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria? Not necessarily, according to a U.N. Security Council
counterterrorism monitoring team.
Extremist fighters have proven remarkably adept over the past three decades at
transforming themselves at the close of battles. Consider, for example, the case of al
Qaeda, which had its roots in the Afghan mujahideen uprising in the late 1980s against
Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The U.S.-led overthrow of the Afghan Taliban in 2001 in
response to its harboring of Osama bin Laden served to unleash a new generation of
jihadis that applied their skills on other battlefields, including Syria and Iraq.
The military defeat of ISIL in the Syrian Arab Republic and Iraq, which is not
impossible in the medium term, could have the unintended consequence of scattering
violent foreign terrorist fighters across the world, further complicating the response,
the U.N. monitoring team, headed by Alexander Evans, concluded in a report issued

this week. The strategic threat is even greater in 2015 and the years ahead.
The team estimated there are currently more than 25,000 so-called foreign terrorist
fighters from 100 countries active in conflicts from Somalia to Syria. The vast majority
of these fighters more than 20,000 are in Syria and Iraq, serving in a veritable
international finishing school for violent extremists and defying U.S. and U.N. efforts
to contain them. The personal relations developed among these connected, Internetsavvy jihadis in the Middle East conflict may be applied elsewhere. Those who eat
together and bond together can bomb together, according to the report.
More than half the countries in the world are currently generating foreign terrorist
fighters, according to the Evans report. The rate of flow is higher than ever, and
mainly focused on movement into the Syrian Arab Republic and Iraq, with a growing
problem also evident in Libya.
Many jihadis will return home from the wars in Syria and Iraq and put a life of violence
behind them. But others will look to take up the fight elsewhere. There are already
indications that some foreign fighters are moving on.
Since the beginning of 2015, there has even been a new reverse flow from the Middle
East to Libya, according to the report. Libya is increasingly becoming a base for
incoming fighters to receive military-style training including, the team concluded, in
attack planning, evasion, bombing, and psychological warfare.
The resilience of international jihadi movements underscores the challenges facing
U.S. and U.N. policymakers as Jeh Johnson, the U.S. secretary for homeland security,
attends a high-level meeting Friday, May 29, of the U.N. Security Council to coordinate
the international response. The 15-nation council issues a statement urging countries
to enforce border controls and plug other legal gaps that allow suspect terrorists to
travel unimpeded across international borders. It registered its concern that only 51 of
the U.N.s 193 member states are using advancing information systems to screen
passengers passing through their territories.
More than 22,000 foreign terrorist fighters from more than 100 nations have traveled
to Syria since the beginning of the conflict there, including 4,000 from the West,
Johnson told the council. More than 180 Americans have traveled or attempted to
travel to Syria. Johnson said states need to implement U.N. measures requiring the
criminalization of travel by foreign terrorist fighters. They also need to impose tighter
border controls, expand criminal investigations and prosecutions of extremist
combatants, and counter the promotion of extremist ideology at home.
The meeting hosted by Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius, whose nation
holds the Security Council presidency this month comes six months after U.S.
President Barack Obama chaired a September 2014 Security Council summit to adopt
a resolution that criminalizes individuals planning to travel to war zones to engage in
terrorist activities. Fridays meeting in New York aims to take stock of the progress and
setbacks the international community has faced since then. The meeting also highlight
statements from U.N. counterterrorism officials, U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Jan

Eliasson, and Interpol Secretary-General Jurgen Stock.

In advance of the meeting, the Security Councils Counter-Terrorism
Committee Executive Directorate issued a separate report Thursday assessing the
impact of U.N. efforts to confront extremism and identified several shortcomings.
There appears to be virtually no short-term possibility of ending certain threats by the
Islamic State, al-Nusra Front, and other al Qaeda inspired extremist organizations,
according to the directorates report. A significant long-term risk will derive from
alumni foreign terrorist fighters upon their return to their own countries or upon their
arrival to third countries. The movements will not be fully geographically contained,
the 30-page report concluded.
The directorate which surveyed 21 countries found that only a handful of
countries had complied with Security Council demands to adopt laws criminalizing the
planning or preparation of terrorist acts committed in another state. Only five of those
countries require advance information about the identity of entering travelers.
In visa-free or visa-upon arrival regimes, such systems may offer the only meaningful
way to identify potential foreign terrorist fighters, the directorates report found. And
only one country which was not identified in the report tracks transiting
passengers without going through customs. The directorate considers that to be a
global systemic shortfall which should be addressed as a matter of urgency, the report
said.
But human rights advocates claimed that the Security Councils approach to battling
terrorism has infringed on human rights.
Every time the Security Council has passed a binding counterterrorism resolution
since 9/11, a wave of draconian counter-terrorism laws has followed, said Letta
Tayler, a senior researcher on human rights and counterterrorism at Human Rights
Watch.
States have not only violated suspects rights with these laws, they also have used
them to quash legitimate dissent and target ethnic and religious groups, she said.
Tayler urged the Security Council to make clear that human rights must be respected,
even as states crack down on terror traffic. Foreign fighters legislation that tramples
on rights is not only unlawful, it will also backfire, she said.
Photo credit: Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images
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