Jim Cunningham – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Jim Cunningham on 2016-03-08.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, pursuant to the Answer of 7 March 2016 to Question 29560, what assessment he has made of trends in the number of active Daesh fighters in (a) Iraq, (b) Libya and (c) Syria in each of the last 24 months; and if he will make a statement.

Mr Tobias Ellwood

As outlined in our response to PQ 29560 the latest available public figures on the number of Daesh fighters in Iraq and Syria come from the US. These put the number at approximately 19,000 – 25,000, compared to 20,000 – 31,000 fighters in 2014.

Our current estimate for the number of Daesh fighters in Libya is between 3,000 – 6,000. We do not have earlier estimates from which we could extrapolate a trend. The vast majority of Daesh fighters in Libya are foreigners rather than Libyans. While some Daesh figures have called for foreign fighters to go to Libya rather than Iraq/Syria, we have not seen any evidence to suggest this has happened.