The West’s Foreign Fighter Problem – Wall Street Journal Editorial
With Islamic State’s physical caliphate destroyed, the West faces an urgent challenge: what to do with foreign fighters and their families. Mishandling the problem could create decades of security threats in the U.S. and Europe, and several American allies are bungling this test.
Some 40,000 foreigners traveled to Iraq and Syria to join ISIS in recent years. While more recruits came from the Middle East and North Africa, some 5,000 left Europe to join the caliphate. A 2018 report from the George Washington University Program on Extremism estimated that about 300 were American…