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Officials: British Terrorists Among Rebel Factions in Syria Become Significant Threat to UK Security
| WTF News |
Katharine Tobal
The threat to the UK from returning extremists from the Syrian foreign-hatched conflict is now the same as that from al-Qaeda terrorists in the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan, The Telegraph reported days ago.
Charles Farr, the Britain’s chief anti-terrorism official has raised the alarm over the danger of terror related to crisis in Syria. He said leaks by US whistleblower Edward Snowden had “made our counter-terrorist work harder than it was before and means we can no longer do some of the things we were doing.”
Releasing the Home Office’s annual counter-terrorism report on Wednesday April, 9, Charles Farr said Syria-related terrorism is the main challenge facing the UK security services.
“Counter-terrorism work by the UK has got more challenging and harder [in the past 12 months],” the security official said.
The report – which covers the year to September 2013 – said a number of people, likely to be in the low hundreds, had travelled from the UK to support terrorist groups fighting in Syria – “many more than travelled to Iraq.”
In February, Farr had warned that the security threat from the terrorists inside Syria is “the biggest challenge” facing the police and intelligence agencies since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Telegraph added that the increased risk will refocus attention on the decision by David Cameron – backed by MPs in the House of Commons – not to intervene as the Syrian conflict worsened last August.
Last year the Prime Minister, Cameron described some of the so called “rebels” who are fighting the government in Syria as “extremely dangerous terrorists”.
A senior Whitehall source told The Telegraph: “We are seeing a growing threat to the UK from terrorist groups in Syria. The threat to the UK comes from a range of countries and groups but Syria is perhaps the biggest challenge right now.”
There are fears that British men who have been radicalized in Syria are also being encouraged to return to the UK to carry out attacks in UK rather than staying to fight in Syria. As many as more than 500 Britons have went to Syria to fight in the past three years – far higher than the numbers who travelled to Iraq. For the past two years, British jihadists have been able to gain access bomb and weapons training as well as further radicalization.
The police and security services in UK are understood to be monitoring around half of that numbers who have returned. Some arrests have been made, as many newspapers reported.
A senior Whitehall source told The Telegraph: “We are seeing a growing threat to the UK from terrorist groups in Syria. “The threat to the UK comes from a range of countries and groups but Syria [war] is perhaps the biggest challenge right now.”
Some 22 people had their British nationality revoked last year on suspicion of terrorist involvement.
According to Western government sources, thousands of foreigners are currently in Syria, operating alongside extremist and terrorist groups, UK intelligence sources told the Daily Telegraph in December last year that from among the 1,000 Westerners operating against the Syrian government over 300 are British nationals.
Several Western countries, including Britain, have played a major role in fanning the flames of conflict in Syria by arming and training militants.
Syria’s proximity to Europe makes it easier and cheaper for would-be extremists to head there and does not appear as “foreign” as the once-Al-Qaeda strongholds of Afghanistan/northern Pakistan and Somalia or Yemen
Monitoring of terrorists in Syria by British intelligence agencies is made more difficult because of the ease with which they are able to move around the country.
Meanwhile, the foreign-sponsored Syrian war was identified as the “most significant development in global terrorism” in the Home Office annual review of its counter-terrorism strategy Contest this week.
