The Homecoming of Foreign Fighters in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium: Policies and Challenges. Egmont Commentary, 12 April 2018

Coolsaet, Rik and Renard, Thomas (2018) The Homecoming of Foreign Fighters in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium: Policies and Challenges. Egmont Commentary, 12 April 2018. [Policy Paper]

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Abstract

Some 5000 men, women and children have travelled from Europe to Syria and Iraq since 2012. Less than a year after this process began, European intelligence services started to openly express their concerns about the dangers emanating from the potential return of seasoned fighters. Policy responses, however, were slow in coming and mostly ad hoc, even after the first successful attack by a returning foreign terrorist fighter in May 2014, against the Jewish Museum in Brussels. Subsequent attacks and plots involving returnees in the Walloon city of Verviers (January 2015), in the Amsterdam-Paris Thalys train (August 2015), in Paris (November 2015) and in Brussels (March 2016), proved the early warnings right.

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