LONDON: The fall of President Bashar Assad could usher in a new wave of extremists in Syria, with knock-on effects for other states, UK terrorism experts have warned.
Jonathan Hall KC, the UK’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said the vacuum after the fall of the government in Damascus could create new groups akin to Daesh. He told The Times that he is “as worried as I was with Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.”
With the fall of the government, prisons across Syria have been entered by rebel forces, with thousands of people released.
Many are believed to be innocent civilians or political prisoners, but some are thought to be extremists with experience of fighting for Daesh in northeast Syria.
Thousands of former Daesh fighters are also being held in detention facilities by the Kurdish-led, US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.
“We do not know what will happen to the prisons and detention centers in northeast Syria where the SDF are in charge. It may be that Kurdish autonomy in this part of Syria is undisturbed,” Hall said.
“There will always be the fear that if the SDF did lose control then the battle-hardened and extremist remnants of Islamic State (Daesh) who are currently in detention could form the kernel of a new Islamic State, or rush to join HTS (Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham) and firm up their extremist objectives.”
He added: “Everyone talked about Taliban 2.0 but they turned out just as extreme as the first Taliban; just look at the way they’ve treated women. Anybody with jihadi roots you have to be very worried about.”
Former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove said “lone-wolf” extremists formerly imprisoned by Assad are likely to be the biggest threats.
“Everyone is very enthusiastic about liberation but we’ve all seen what happened in Iraq with (Saddam Hussein’s) statue being torn down and we saw what happened with the same euphoria in Libya, and the situation in Syria is really, really complex,” he added.
“It depends how this plays out in coming months. There are certain circumstances that could fuel terrorism, but at the moment people are looking at the very confusing internal politics of Syria and the myriad of groups that will play out in a struggle to form a government and the hope is it will be genuinely pluralist.
“The organizational structure of (Daesh) is significantly weakened. The question is whether this fuels lone-wolf terrorists or an organized conspiracy … What’s happening in Syria, like what’s happening in Gaza with Hamas, is going to cause individuals to be radicalized to an extent that they carry out lone-wolf attacks.
“If individuals get released, unless they’re part of a highly organized conspiracy, we’re talking about lone wolf terrorists.”
