Europeans are worried about their young Moslem men going off to Syria to wage jihad and coming home with their skills and rage at a higher state of action:
A rapidly increasing flow of Europeans is streaming to Syria to fight on the side of rebel groups aligned with al-Qaeda, raising concerns about homegrown terrorism, top European security officials said Thursday.
The number of Europeans who have traveled to fight in Syria “is estimated at between, more or less, 1,500 and 2,000 people, based on what we’ve heard from our colleagues,” Belgian Interior Minister Joelle Milquet told reporters in Brussels on Thursday, giving an estimate more than double the figure offered last month by U.S. intelligence officials.
And young Moslems are being brought in to be suicide bombers in Syria:
The newest jihad battleground, Syria, has inherited the mantle, as al-Qaida-linked groups eclipse nationalist rebels as the most powerful forces in the fight against President Bashar Assad. The Chicago Project documented almost two dozen suicide bombings there in 2012, and dozens have taken place this year.
Still (as I wondered about earlier), there really aren't that many suicide bombers in Syria, compared to Iraq:
More than 1,300 attacks have been carried out in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, out of more than 3,100 suicide bombings worldwide since 1980, according to data collected by the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism.
Dozens in a year doesn't compare to hundreds per year during the Iraq War. Especially when you consider that al Qaeda in Iraq was far smaller than the jihadi presence in Syria.
Of course, the jihadis in Syria don't have the advantage of having Assad facilitating the funneling of suicide bomber recruits into Iraq to fight us and slaughter Iraqi civilians.
Still, jihadis manage to recruit young Moslem men to fight in Syria when we aren't even involved in the fight.
And the body count is poised to pass the entire Iraq War body count after only a couple years of serious fighting in Syria. I guess staying out of a conflict doesn't, in fact, make things better.
It's a funny world, eh?
