The Guardian view on foreign fighters

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/03/editorial-foreign-fighters-iraq-syria-jihadi

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David Cameron was uncompromising in the warning he gave to anyone thinking of travelling to fight in Syria or Iraq. “You have declared your allegiance,” he said to his party conference in Birmingham on Wednesday. “You are an enemy of the UK – and you should expect to be treated as such.” The prime minister, and the security services, are properly anxious about threat of young men and women travelling abroad to fight or train, and then returning to perpetrate terror here. Earlier in the week, the home secretary announced new measures to tackle non-violent as well as violent extremism. The government is making this an issue that it confronts rather than tries to defuse. That is a dangerous choice.

Although the advent of the Islamic State has changed the terms of the debate, there are many reasons young Europeans are drawn to go and fight – or perhaps marry fighters – in the turmoil of the Middle East’s wars. The Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, at Kings College London, which has assembled a database of 450 foreign fighters over the past 18 months, found no single narrative. It warns against treating them all as a homogenous group. On the centre’s assessment, about one in nine returning jihadis may pose some kind of a security risk. That, in terms of a potential threat, is a big number, and may indeed merit a robust response. But a much bigger number, at least of those who left to fight when Britain was still talking of arming the anti-Assad forces, have idealist notions about fighting the regime. Many now feel betrayed – and they want to come home. As the centre argues, it might be more constructive if the government continued to promote the centre’s Channel Project, which so far has helped to reintegrate 1,000 foreign fighters. Treating them all as potential terrorists is a prophecy that risks becoming self-fulfilling.

Moazzam Begg, the former Guantánamo Bay detainee who was released this week after a series of terrorism charges against him were suddenly dropped, points out to the Guardian that his trips to Syria were – in one sense – in keeping with Britain’s official anti-Assad policy at the time. The treatment of Mr Begg, who was held in detention awaiting trial for more than seven months, is beginning to look dangerously like state harassment. Associates of his report that their bank accounts were shut down and that they have been subjected to repeated questioning by security officers. Yet it has now emerged that – as Mr Begg always claimed – he had kept MI5 informed of his activities training anti-Assad fighters in Syria and it was the disclosure of that evidence, not previously known to the police or the CPS, that resulted in the charges being abruptly dropped. A willingness to engage with the arguments of extremism, rather than seeking to close them down, would be more in keeping with the British values that Mr Cameron wants to defend.