BARCELONA, Spain – The United Kingdom has raised its threat level to “severe,” citing the conflicts in Iraq and Syria and the hundreds of UK nationals who are believed to have filled the jihadi armies of the Islamic State.
The BBC quoted UK Home Secretary Theresa May as saying that the new alert – being raised from “substantial,” meant that an attack on the UK is "highly likely." But she stressed that there is no intelligence to suggest an attack is "imminent."
"The increase in the threat level is related to developments in Syria and Iraq where terrorist groups are planning attacks against the West,” said May.
"Some of those plots are likely to involve foreign fighters who have travelled there from the UK and Europe to take part in those conflicts,” she added.
The UK home secretary was referring to a worrisome trend among European youth in immigrant communities that are the breeding grounds for jihadis fighting in Iraq and Syria.
The jihadi volunteers range from rappers in Britain and Germany to teenage girls from France and Spain.
When Abdel Majed Abdel Bary, a 23-year-old rapper-turned jihadi Tweeted a picture from Syria, it showed the British national holding a severed head. He is suspected of being the man with the covered face and British accent seen in a video cutting off the head of captured American journalist James Foley.
He is not the only IS fighter cutting heads on camera.
Another video posted Thursday on YouTube shows the beheading of a Kurdish Peshmerga figher, as the masked killer declares that the killing is a warning to leaders in the Kurdistan Region to end their alliance with the United States.
The videos are only part of the Islamic States propaganda campaign, which some US officials have assessed as “sophisticated.”
Its campaigns, run through mosques, on Facebook and through other social media, has fueled the alarming trend of more and more youth from Europe and the West attracted to the Islamists bizarre jihad.
Recently, British newspapers reported the father of two British brothers -- 17 and 20 – saying his sons had left for jihad in Syria. He said before they were taken, the jihadists had given the boys a copy of the video war game “Call of Duty” to incite their violent fantasies.
One of the boys later appeared in an Internet photograph with explosives, saying in a caption that the UK is afraid of him returning with his newly-gained deadly skills.
In France, two girls aged 15 and 17 have been placed into custody and are under investigation for wanting to join Islamic militants in Syria.
The French newspaper Le Figaro said the pair was in contact with a third 14-year old girl who had disappeared from her home last June while returning from school. Sources said she may have travelled to Syria.
France is also preparing a series of measures to stop youth from joining the jihad, including setting up a hotline for the families of radicalized youth, so they can report abnormal behavior to the police. In addition, next month the French parliament is expected to pass a bill banning certain radicalized suspects from leaving the country.
Paris is afraid that jihadists with French nationality would return with deadly skills they could use for attacks in the country. It is believed that some 900 French nationals are jihadists or would-be jihadists.
Also this month, Spain detained a 14-year-old as she was trying to cross the border into Morocco. She confessed she was en route to Iraq to join the Islamic State (IS), together with another 19-year-old girl who was arrested with her.
The Government in Madrid has requested the help of the local imams of mosques around the country to fight the radicalization of youth.
In Germany, famous rapper Deso Dogg, who has 100,000 followers on the Internet, has surfaced in Syria on an IS site.
According to a counter-terrorism official quoted by the Los Angeles Times, as many as 10,000 foreign fighters are believed to be fighting in Syria and Iraq, and 3,000 of them hold European or other Western passports.
IS, which has declared an Islamic State straddling Iraq and Syria, has threatened to take its jihad to the world.
The UK has a scale of five levels of threats and this one is the second highest.
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