The whereabouts of hundreds of Britons who travelled to the Middle East to support or fight for jihadist groups is unknown, the security minister has admitted.
Around half of the estimated 850 people from the UK who went to Syria and Iraq have returned home, but Ben Wallace said the Government ‘don’t know where’ those still in the region are.
Many have been killed in fighting, some are returning to Turkey, but it is unclear whether others are now living, he admitted.
The security minister has admitted the UK doesn’t know where some of the jihadis who went to fight in Syria are now hiding out. Imran Khawaja is one of those who was picked up by police and jailed for 12 years in 2015
Mr Wallace denied that the authorities had ‘lost track’ of the suspected terrorists, adding: ‘They went into a very hard part of Syria to reach into the Euphrates valley and then were dispersed from there.’
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘What we do know is about half have come back to the United Kingdom of the original 850-odd that went out of concern.
‘About 15% to 20% we think have died out there either in military action, and at the moment we are seeing in dribs and drabs some of them coming into Turkey, maybe some of them trying to get back to us here, but there’s a significant number that at the moment it is hard to actually tie down exactly where they are.’
British fighters have been among the most high profile members of the terror group, whose influence in the Middle East is now dwindling.
Mohammed Emwazi, dubbed ‘Jihadi John’, appeared in the group’s horrific execution videos before was killed in a US airstrike in 2015.
British fighters were among the most high-profile in the group. ‘Jihadi John’ Mohammed Emwazi and Junead Hussain (left) were both killed in US airstrikes
Junaid Hussain, from Birmingham, was meanwhile involved in recruiting British radicals to the group’s cause and plotting cyber hacks.
He was killed in 2015 at a petrol station in Raqqa by a US airstrike.
A fierce debate has raged about how to deal with the estimated 360 battle-hardened jihadis who have returned to Britain after fighting with Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and the ones who may come back now after the fall of the so-called caliphate.
Terror law watchdog Max Hill QC caused a storm earlier this month when he said ‘naïve’ teenagers should be allowed to reintegrate into society, while Foreign Office Minister Rory Stewart said most followers of IS’s ‘hateful doctrine’ posed a ‘serious danger’ to the UK and should be killed.