NEW YORK (Web Desk) – As many as 25,000 fighters from over 100 countries of the world joined the Islamic State (ISIS) and al-Qaida lined groups, said a recently issued report by United Nations.
According to a panel of experts, monitoring the terrorism worldwide, the number of foreigners joining terrorists has increased by 71 percent between mid-2014 and March 2015.
It said the scale of the problem has increased over the past three years and the flow of foreign fighters “is higher than it has ever been historically.”
The overall number of foreign terrorist fighters has “risen sharply from a few thousand … a decade ago to more than 25,000 today,” the report quoted.
The report said just two countries have accounted for over 20,000 foreign fighters: Syria and Iraq. They went to fight primarily for the Islamic State group but also the Al-Nusra Front.
Looking ahead, the panel said the thousands of foreign fighters who traveled to Syria and Iraq are living and working as it was in the case of Afghanistan in the 1990s.
A military defeat of the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq could have the unintended consequence of scattering violent foreign terrorist fighters across the world, the panel argued.
