From left to right: Dan Benjamin, Dan Byman, Jeremy Shapiro and Will McCants discuss a new Brookings policy paper on foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria. (Haley Hinkle/MNS)
WASHINGTON – Two Brookings Institution fellows highlighted strategies Monday for stopping terrorist attacks on U.S. soil carried out by foreign-trained fighters. The think tank experts, however, said that some would-be terrorists are bound to slip through the cracks when they return to their home countries.
Failure in western nations to acknowledge the tragic inevitability of terrorism causes fear of foreign fighters to be “exaggerated,” policy authors Dan Byman and Jeremy Shapiro said. In reality, security experts are equipped to recognize and detain threatening individuals, and have done it in the past, they said.
Byman and Shapiro said improving techniques for dissuading individuals who may be interested in traveling abroad for training and also rehabilitating those who return to their home countries would reduce the risk of violence. Many of those who do plan to go abroad could be stopped by tighter travel restrictions in Turkey, a common and convenient path to countries like Syria and Iraq, they said.
New policies outlined in the Brookings paper are particularly timely in light of the terror attacks that rocked Paris last week. It is not yet clear whether the individuals responsible for the attacks at weekly satire magazine Charlie Hebdo were foreign fighters. However, public response to what has happened in France provides evidence of common responses to terrorism, the authors said.
“We know as a generalized rule that immediately after an outrage like this, we tend to have certain reactions which don’t help the policy response,” Shapiro, a former adviser for the State Department, said.
These reactions include a tendency to overestimate the involvement of foreign networks in the attack, and the imposition of short-term policies that alienate certain populations rather than actually stopping terrorism. Concerns have already been raised about increased anti-Islam sentiment in France and across Europe following the Charlie Hebdo shootings.
In the paper entitled “Be Afraid. Be a Little Afraid: The Threat of Terrorism from Western Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq,” authors Byman and Shapiro identify several stages that they say individuals go through as foreign fighters.
These range from deciding to travel abroad to join a terrorist group, to returning to countries of origin in the West. Security experts are equipped to recognize and detain threatening individuals, and have done it in the past, the authors said.
The fact that authorities must decide who does and does not pose a serious threat to Western countries is critical to understanding when to intervene. But the actual cost to monitoring an individual for an entire year can be extreme, yet at the same time, “the price for failure is high,” Shapiro said.
“That’s what you do when you triage,” Byman, who has served on the 9/11 Commission and as a Middle Eastern policy analyst for the U.S. government, said. “You make judgments about who is the most dangerous.”
Byman said in the U.S. school shootings are sometimes taken as a terrible reality, but mistakes in preventing terrorism are not as readily accepted. “We have to understand what security forces must do,” he said.
Shapiro said, “the strong societal reaction in France shows, such terrorists can commit violence against individuals, but they can’t really threaten the society.”
