According to the report, about 30,000 foreigners, including more than 250 Americans, have entered Syria and Iraq since 2011.
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“Sadly, global efforts have failed to stop the flow of these aspiring jihadists into Syria, and we have already seen “returnees” from the conflict zone come home to America and Europe and plot acts of terror”, McCaul said.
Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul warned that the United States faced a grave and growing threat from foreign fighters. “Even more, those still on the battlefield are radicalizing their peers online and inciting them to launch homegrown attacks”.
The report also reflects on the 10,000 foreign fighters that battled the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, contributing to the rise of Al Qaeda.
“Instead, countries including the United States rely on a patchwork system for swapping individual extremist identities”, the report found, calling that system “an inherently weak arrangement that increases the odds a foreign fighter will be able to cross the border undetected when traveling to and from a terrorist sanctuary”.
The committee released the report the same day President Barack Obama chaired a summit at the UN General Assembly highlighting the worldwide community’s efforts to counter ISIS, address the foreign fighters issue and counter violent extremism. It did not provide details on the several dozen who have sneaked back into the United States without being arrested or monitored.
Among the individuals it sanctioned in Syria was British national Aqsa Mahmood, who is accused of recruiting three British schoolgirls in February to flee the United Kingdom to become wives of Islamic State fighters.
Targets near Hawija bore the brunt of the barrage in Iraq, with eight strikes hitting a tactical unit and destroying a staging area, 45 Islamic State fighting positions and buildings and vehicles, the Combined Joint Task Force said in the statement released on Wednesday.
According to the final report, of the hundreds of Americans who have sought to travel to Syria and Iraq, authorities have only interdicted a fraction of them.
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The bipartisan committee’s six-month review, the most extensive since the 9/11 Commission’s report, offers several suggestions on how to make the USA safe from jihadis returning from war in Iraq and Syria.
