BICOM

An anti-terrorist operation to monitor and share information about European jihadis who have fought for ISIS and plan to return to Europe now involves 22 countries including Israel, the US and Germany, according to a report in the German magazine Der Spiegel.

The US-led anti-terror operation known as “Gallant Phoenix” is organised by a US Joint Special Operations Command centre in Jordan. It collects intelligence on fighters who fought for militia groups, including ISIS. At the command centre, relevant information including documents, data, DNA traces and fingerprints that have been retrieved from former ISIS sites are then compared with existing intelligence.

An estimated 40,000 people travelled from around the world to fight for ISIS as it occupied territory in Syria and Iraq and declared a caliphate in 2014. Officials have warned that many “Islamic State” fighters have already returned home. So far, around one-third of German jihadis who travelled to the Middle East have already returned. The German intelligence agency, the BND, has said it identified 705 individuals living in Germany who are considered to be at risk of committing a terrorist attack on German soil — more than five times as many as in 2013.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a recent meeting with Ambassadors from NATO member states, including the British Ambassador David Quarrey, confirmed Israel’s role in sharing intelligence on jihadi groups in the region. “We have, through our intelligence services, provided information that has stopped several dozen major terrorist attacks, many of them in European countries,” he said. “Some of these could have been mass attacks, of the worst kind that you have experienced on the soil of Europe and even worse, because they involve civil aviation. Israel has prevented that, and thereby helped save many European lives.”

Netanyahu claimed “that Israel is the most powerful indigenous force in the Middle East that fights radical Islam”.