Foreign Fighters of ISIS and Their Security Threat The Experience of Türkiye (2014—2016)

Abstract

Foreign fighters have been on battlefields as devoted fighting volunteers since the emergence of nation states, but their nature has changed with ISIS. The chapter suggests that foreign fighters, defined as illegal by the United Nations with the designation of “foreign terrorist fighters”, spread violence to other geographies when they return from conflict zones. In this respect, the chapter discusses conceptual approaches for foreign fighters and examines the hypothesis by analyzing a dataset encompassing ISIS-linked terrorist attacks in Turkey between 2014 and 2016. The findings related to the Turkish case are accepted as the first indicator that ISIS’s foreign fighters cause violence to start spreading.