Foreign fighters joining ISIS militants in Iraq & Syria decreased from 2,000 to 200 per month

AhlulBayt News Agency - The number of foreign fighters joining the ISIS (ISIL, Daesh, IS) militant group in Iraq and Syria has decreased sharply in the past year to about 200 a month, a U.S. military official claims on Tuesday.

“That is a drastic decline from about a year ago when between 1,500 and 2,000 foreign militants were joining the group in Iraq and Syria each month,” Air Force Major General Peter Gersten, deputy commander for operations and intelligence for the US-led coalition, during a news briefing on Tuesday.

In a report earlier this month, the US State Department allegedly announced that the number of the foreign terrorists in Iraq and Syria was lower than at any time in the past two years.

The State Department, citing a 2015 report published by a former British spy chief, said Syria has become the main global incubator for a new generation of militants as Daesh recruited as many 31,000 foreign militants in the past 18 months.

Meanwhile, Gersten stated that the number of militants defecting from the Takfiri group was increasing as well, but he refused to give a specific number.

"We're seeing a fracture in their morale, we're seeing their inability to pay, we're seeing the inability to fight, we're watching them try to leave ISIS in every single way," Gersten said, using an Arabic acronym for ISIL.

ISIS terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control large parts of Iraq and Syria, where they are engaged in crimes against humanity.

US warplanes have been conducting airstrikes against ISIL in Iraq since August of 2014. Some Western states have also participated in some of the strikes in Iraq.

Since September 2014, the US and some of its Arab allies have been carrying out airstrikes against Daesh inside Syria without any authorization from Damascus or a UN mandate.





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