Australians fighting in Syria: how many have joined the conflict?
|
Version 0 of 1. While the prime minister, Tony Abbott, toured Asia on Tuesday spruiking Australian wheat, wine and cheese, the attorney general, George Brandis, was in Washington DC reporting a grimmer national export. “I am sorry to have to tell you that per capita, Australia is one of the largest sources of foreign war fighters to the Syrian conflict from countries outside the region,” he told the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Australians shooting off to the world’s ugliest war zones is not a new phenomenon, Brandis said. Between 1990 and 2010, at least 30 Australians had fought or trained with extremist groups in conflict areas as far flung as Pakistan and Somalia. David Hicks had travelled to the disputed region of Kashmir before he was picked up in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo Bay. “The difference is the scale of the problem,” Brandis said. “The number of Australians participating in the conflict in Syria is higher than we’ve experienced with previous conflicts, with assessments of between 120 and 150 Australians travelling to the greater Syria region to participate in the conflict.” “We also know that Australians are taking up senior leadership roles in the conflict,” he added. It’s startling news. But how accurate is it? Brandis is privy to briefings by Australia’s top security agencies, who in turn have access to intelligence gathered by American and European agencies, as well as their own network of sources on the ground. We don’t get to see that information. But there is some publicly available data against which we can measure the attorney general’s claims. A researcher at Monash University’s global terrorism research centre, Andrew Zammit, has crunched the numbers from a series of reports by Aaron Zelin and others from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, the latest of which was published in December 2013. They draw on a number of sources, including Arabic media reports, government estimates, and the death notices which routinely appear on jihadist forums, to give low and high estimates of how many foreigners have taken up arms in Syria, and where they’ve come from. The low estimates are fully confirmed cases, and the high estimates represent the maximum number based on credible sources. Here are the numbers, adjusted for population. We've used per 100,000 people rather than Brandis' per capita claim, as the per capita figures produce a very large number of decimal places. Sort the columns by clicking on a column heading: So is Australia “one of the largest sources” per capita of foreign fighters in Syria? Well it depends. Taking the high estimate of proportion of fighters by country population, we rank inside the top half, at seventh out of 22. But on the low estimates, countries such as Belgium, Norway, Bosnia and Denmark appear to be contributing a much greater share of their citizens to the carnage. Either way, it’s clear that this isn’t a peculiarly Australian problem. “It’s true that our proportion is higher, but we’re looking at a global dynamic. This conflict has drawn in more foreign fighters than a decade in Afghanistan … It’s Afghanistan on steroids,” professor Greg Barton, a Monash University terrorism specialist, said. Barton offers a few reasons for why so many Australians are wading into the Syrian conflict. Partly it’s because Australia has large immigrant communities from countries which border Syria, namely Lebanon and Turkey. In addition, the civil war is being broadcast live over social media, allowing armchair jihadists to “virtually be part of the conflict”. But it might also be that Australia’s disproportionate contribution to Syria’s battlefields is just the darker side of the same adventurous impulse that sends droves of young Australians overseas each year for more benign reasons. “Australians travel a lot, they tend to be more internationally engaged than say, young Americans. And that’s basically good, but with something like this it’s a vulnerability, and that’s probably the larger part of the explanation,” Barton said. “We always overachieve when it comes to global engagement.” He also noted that the King’s College figures are now four months old, and the Syrian conflict is moving quickly. “The Brandis comments yesterday suggests that the King’s College numbers from December are now lagging a bit behind what we’ve actually got, and that the problem is moving forward, and not being held in check effectively,” he said. More concerning is that the figures Brandis quoted yesterday might actually be a low estimate. “There’s reasons to believe it could be even higher. He’s not putting numbers out there that are highly speculative. He’s using conservative numbers,” Barton said. |