General: US Worried Over ISIS Recruitment in Europe

ISIS Boosting Recruitment Throughout Europe

Major General Walter Piatt, the commander of the US Army forces in Europe, today said the US is increasingly concerned by the “acceleration” of ISIS recruitment across the continent.

“It’s a concern … We’ve seen it all the way throughout Europe and it’s impossible to track every single person where they are,” Piatt noted, adding that there is a lot of “spillover” from the Syrian Civil War.

ISIS is believed to have recruited over 1,000 EU citizens for its war, though exact figures are subject to a fairly wide level of speculation. Recruitment out of countries like France, however, is known to have been significant.

Earlier in the Syrian Civil War, there was a lot of fear that when the war was over, these recruits would return to their home countries with connections to ISIS leaders and other international jihadists, with so many EU nations joining in the US war against ISIS, however, the blowback could come much sooner, with ISIS no longer wholly dependent on the war on Syria to justify its recruitment.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.