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U.S. can’t track all of the American jihadists home from Syria

May 20, 2014 11:47 am By Robert Spencer

Syriastamp“Senior American intelligence officials tell The Daily Beast that they believe between six and 12 Americans who have gone to Syria to fight Assad have now returned to America.” They can’t find twelve guys? Are intelligence officials too busy conducting outreach meetings with Muslim Brotherhood groups in the U.S., so as to reassure Muslims that they’re not “Islamophobic”? And why aren’t mosques in the U.S. posting photos of these people and reporting them to authorities when they’re spotted?

“Exclusive: U.S. Can’t Track All of the American Jihadists Home From Syria,” by Eli Lake, Daily Beast, May 20, 2014:

The number of American extremists who have flocked to Syria is higher than previously understood, American intelligence sources say. And some of the fighters are coming home.

Western intelligence services have been warning that European and American jihadists have been flocking to Syria to fight. But they’ve been reluctant to say how many Americans have joined the extremist forces there—until now. The latest U.S. intelligence estimates say that more than 100 Americans have joined the jihad in Syria to fight alongside Sunni terrorists there.

Senior American intelligence officials tell The Daily Beast that they believe between six and 12 Americans who have gone to Syria to fight Assad have now returned to America. “We know where some are,” one senior U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast. “The concern is the scale of the problem we are dealing with.”

The scale of that problem by all accounts has gotten worse. Last fall, the official U.S. estimate on Americans specifically who have joined the jihad in Syria was in the low double digits. In January, the New York Times reported that at least 70 Americans have either traveled or attempted to travel to Syria. Earlier this month FBI Director James Comey told reporters that he believed “dozens” of Americans were suspected to be foreign fighters in Syria, but declined to give a more precise number.

In recent months, the U.S. intelligence community has made the tracking of all Westerners going to fight into Syria a top priority. Speaking in March before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, described in vague terms an effort by the whole government to find Western citizens traveling to Syria and to track their travel.

“In light of the large foreign fighter component in Syria crisis, we are working together to gather every piece of information we can about the identity of these individuals,” he said at the time.

More recently, the issue of Western foreign fighters came up in top-level meetings between the Syrian opposition delegation and the Obama administration last week to Washington, D.C.

“We view all foreign fighters as a threat and they are not welcome. There is a convergence of interests between the moderate Syrian opposition and the international community in fighting these foreign fighters and insuring they do not use Syria as a launching pad for external attacks,” said Oubai Shabandar, a strategic communications adviser to the Syrian opposition’s foreign mission in Washington. “This was a major topic of conversation this month in meetings with the Syrian opposition delegation and top U.S. officials.”

The problem, U.S. counter-terrorism and intelligence officials tell The Daily Beast, is that there are just so many jihadists with Western passports traveling to fight in Syria that they worry some of them may slip back into the United States without being detected.

“The NSA does not have the ability to track thousands of bad guys—and on the human intelligence side, this is even more difficult,” another senior U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast. “So we are worried that people are slipping through the cracks.”…

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Filed Under: American jihadis Tagged With: featured


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Comments

  1. mariam rove says

    May 20, 2014 at 11:51 am

    I travel over seas for biz a lot. How is it when I get back they scrutinize you and wanting to know where you been? what countries you visited? the purpose of you trip etc… Yet they can’t find jihadists? Some thing is not right here. M

  2. Charli Main says

    May 20, 2014 at 11:52 am

    Try stopping their FREE handouts and FREE benefits. They will soon surface, screaming discrimination, racism and Islamophobia.

  3. Angemon says

    May 20, 2014 at 11:54 am

    “The NSA does not have the ability to track thousands of bad guys”

    “Bad guys”, eh? Is that some sort of technical jargon?

  4. john spielman says

    May 20, 2014 at 12:02 pm

    no problem just cancel their passports and make them persona non grata!

  5. awake says

    May 20, 2014 at 1:30 pm

    A complete moratorium on Muslim immigration to the U.S. like, oh, I don’t know, about 14 years ago, would have been a good start.

    • dumbledoresarmy says

      May 20, 2014 at 9:59 pm

      Yep.

      It’s not too late for Americans – and, elsewhere, Australians, and Britons, and French, and Canadians, and everyone else in the whole non-Muslim world, in the West and beyond it – to write to their respective governments NOW pointing that out, and demanding that, at the very least, as a precautionary measure, we should stop Muslim immigration *now*.

      When in hole, stop digging.

      Got Muslims? – got Jihad. That is, by now, obvious.

      The obvious conclusion is that the *more* Muslims you got, the *more* Jihad…and, conversely, the *fewer* Muslims, the * less* Jihad.

      So…let’s at least *stop bringing in more*.

      Then it will be easier to work round to dealing with the ones we’ve already got inside the gate.

      PS In the runup to our last federal election in Australia I was telephone-polled no less than three times, and asked what I thought about all sorts of things (none of which were at the top of my list of priorities) and I was also asked what *I* thought was *the* big issue. And each time I said that above and before all else, I wanted to BAN all further Muslim immigration into Australia. Each time I cited what Mohammed Merah did to 8 year old Miriam Monsonego in the schoolyard in Toulouse – a murder driven by the Jew-hatred that is hard-wired into the core texts of Islam – and I said: if we keep importing Muslims, *sooner or later something like that, or worse, will happen HERE*; so let’s NOT bring in any more Muslims. I think I simply shocked the pants off the interviewer, every time.

  6. Bezelel says

    May 20, 2014 at 2:08 pm

    I have read that Jordan is not allowing any to return. Why should the US?

    • EYESOPEN says

      May 20, 2014 at 3:28 pm

      Good question. We shouldn’t.

      • Mirren10 says

        May 20, 2014 at 5:44 pm

        And neither should **any other country** !

    • Vostro says

      May 21, 2014 at 11:38 am

      Although I can’t think of many, there could be some legitimate reasons why a person might travel to Syria other than joining jihad.

  7. Kepha says

    May 20, 2014 at 8:22 pm

    Why are our goons allowed back in the USA?

    It’s the way US citizenship and nationality law work. If they’re non-citizens, you can hold a hearing and strip them of immigration benefits, but it has to be with due process of law (our Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment speak of the rights of persons rather than limiting such things as free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, and all those due process items to citizens).

    If we do it for Communists, we have to do it for Qaida-ites who have US citizenship.

    • Bezelel says

      May 20, 2014 at 9:58 pm

      They could be charged with treason, except obaMUD is funding them.

    • dumbledoresarmy says

      May 20, 2014 at 10:05 pm

      Perhaps there’s an argument to be made – all across the West, not only in the USA – for making *citizenship* a lot harder to get in the first place, and after a much longer period of probation (which would allow more time for the likely-to-go-jihad to blot their copybooks and thus disqualify themselves). And make permanent residency rather more difficult to obtain, also.

  8. Alice says

    May 21, 2014 at 12:41 am

    They can’t find them because they are too busy reading our facebook posts. After all, WE are the “radicals”…

  9. Terry says

    May 21, 2014 at 8:38 am

    Are there not already untold numbers in the US from all the numerous areas where the world is confronted by Islam?

  10. onisac says

    May 21, 2014 at 1:44 pm

    “To find out who rules over you, simply learn who it is you are not allowed to criticize.”. VOLTAIR,

    True’r words are far and few between.

  11. Elisheva14 says

    May 21, 2014 at 9:40 pm

    The reason they aren’t being stopped is that this is all part of the greater plan to destroy the US. Look at the UK. It is finished along with most of Europe.

    Certainly, they could check your passport and see where you have traveled.

    The US is critical of Israel inspecting people who come into the country. Once you get on a flight they know who is going to arrive. To avoid violent or hostile visitors: they profile incoming passengers. Security is at the airport and stops passengers who are suspicious before they even reach customs. All the names of passengers are well known. Pictures are available. Technology makes it all possible.

    The US could track these people if they wanted to. But, they don’t. All countries consider the returnees from Syria as very dangerous with a firm ideology of violence and hate.

    The US will suffer from the US appeasement of Terrorists.

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