Britain’s assistant attorney general for national security, John Carlin, told CBS News on Thursday there are currently more than 18,000 foreign fighters from more than 60 countries in Syria and Iraq. More than 3,000 of those are drawn from Western Europe, he said.
Britain’s MI5 Security Service chief Andrew Parker warned in an address delivered from the domestic intelligence agency’s headquarters that Al Qaeda terrorists in Syria are planning more attacks in the West.
Parker last spoke out publicly in October 2013; this time, he said, the threat from terrorists in Syria is “ongoing and increasing.”
ISIS fighters are “trying to direct terror attacks in the UK elsewhere from Syria, using violent extremists here as their instruments,” he said, according to CBS News. Three such plots have already been foiled, he added, but did not elaborate. “Strikingly, working with our partners, we have stopped three UK terrorist plots in recent months alone. Deaths would certainly have resulted otherwise…
“We still face more complex and ambitious plots that follow the now sadly well established approach of Al Qaeda and its imitators; attempts to cause large scale loss of life, often by attacking transport systems or iconic targets. We know, for example, that a group of core Al Qaeda terrorists in Syria is planning mass casualty attacks against the West,” he said.
All that having been said, however, Parker added that he didn’t want to sound “unduly pessimistic or to suggest we face some sort of unmanageable crisis. We do not.” The intelligence chief noted that although the “going is getting tougher” there are good reasons for confidence in Britain’s “enduring ability to respond.”