“Foreign fighters continue to flow into Syria to join ISIS despite its forces being largely decimated, Pentagon Joint Chiefs chairman Joe Dunford said Tuesday. Even though the extremist group’s territory has shrunk to a fraction of what it once was, new followers arrive, mostly over the Turkish border, at a rate of about 100 a month, Dunford said. While that is down from a peak of about 1,500 a month three years ago, it shows that ISIS’s ability to attract followers remains potent, he said. ‘It’s the flow of foreign fighters, the ability to move resources, and the ideology that allows these groups to operate,’ Dunford said, opening a conference on countering violent extremism. Dunford also said that the inflow adds to the mounting problem of how to handle hundreds of captured foreign fighters whose home countries will not take them back. He said the Syrian Democratic Forces are holding more than 700 ISIS fighters from around 40 countries. ‘The progress of returning these fighters home for prosecution has been delayed by political considerations and inconsistent legal frameworks.’”
Source: US: Foreign fighters still joining ISIS in Syria – Al Arabiya English
