Concern surrounding ISIS over the past week has centered on their sudden, dramatic surge into Iraq, and what their new Islamic State, now more reality than rhetoric, will mean to the region.
But ISIS ability to recruit westerners, with US and EU passports, has been a long-standing issue, and one many have been seeing for quite some time as a serious long-term threat.
The theory was that ISIS recruits would return from Syria to their home countries with contacts to international Islamist militants, and passports that would give them access most jihadists don’t have.
That concern remains real, and ISIS’s high-profile gains in Iraq may even make their recruitment efforts more effective, and ISIS establishment as a more-or-less permanent nation-state may turn this already long-term security threat into an open-ended one.
