Foreign Fighters of ISIS and their Security Threat: Turkey’s Experience (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 article 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 article 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.

Keywords

Foreign Fighters, Foreign Terrorist Fighters, Terrorism, ISIS, Syria

Citation

Yalçınkaya, Haldun, “Foreign Fighters of ISIS and their Security Threat: Turkey’s Experience (2014-2016)”, International Relations, Volume 14, Issue 53, 2017, pp. 23-43.

Affiliations

• Haldun YALÇINKAYA, Assoc. Prof. Dr., Department of Political Science and International Relations, TOBB University of Economics and Technology