We have been hearing for some time now that hundreds of mainly young people have left the U.K. and found their way to Iraq and Syria to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Headlines about young schoolgirls with excellent exam results and bright prospects sneaking across the border from Turkey, or the cold brutality of “Jihadi John” as a representative of Britain’s ISIS executioners, have made for chilling reading.
While the media obsesses about the individual stories behind these defections, the U.K. government—like those in Australia, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, United States, Spain, as well as a number of northern African states—is desperately seeking a strategy to combat the lure of recruitment to jihad.
Overall, the police have noted that more than 700 potential terrorist suspects have traveled to Syria over the past year.
Meanwhile Scotland Yard reported recently that a record 338 people were arrested for terror-related activities in the U.K. in the year to March 2015—almost one per day. This represents a dramatic increase of 33 percent on the 254 who were arrested in 2013/2014—a shocking statistic. Close analysis of those 338 arrests, shows that more than half were arrested in relation to their activities in Syria. Almost 8 in 10 of these suspects arrested were British nationals.
Disaffected Youth
This makes the situation even more dangerous in terms of security as there is no real “type” that we can determine as more likely than others to get involved with ISIS. Statistics increasingly indicate that the majority of those involved are young—56 were below the age of 20.
