Rabat - A new U.N. report has revealed that the largest numbers of foreign fighters fighting for extremist groups in the Middle East are from Morocco and Tunisia.
According to the panel of experts monitoring U.N. sanctions against al-Qaida, the high numbers of foreign fighter come mainly from Morocco, Tunisia, France and Russia.
The report indicated that there has also been an increase in the number of fighters from the Maldives, Finland and Trinidad and Tobago. Fighters are also joining extremist groups from some countries in sub-Saharan Africa which the report did not name.
The number of countries the fighters come from has risen dramatically from a small group in the 1990s to over 100 nowadays, the report says.
The number of fighters joining extremist groups in Iraq, Syria and other countries has also increased significantly to more than 25,000 from over 100 nations.
The analysis has found that the number of foreign fighters worldwide increased by 71 per cent between mid-2014 and March 2015. It said that the flow of foreign fighters "is higher than it has even been historically."
The overall number of foreign terrorist fighters has "risen sharply from a few thousand a decade ago to more than 25,000 today," the panel said in the report to the U.N. Security Council.
It said that Syria and Iraq have accounted for over 20,000 foreign fighters. They went to fight primarily for the Islamic State (IS) group and the Al-Nusra Front.
The panel said that the foreign fighters "pose an immediate and long-term threat" and "an urgent global security problem" that needs to be tackled on many fronts.
The panel said that less than 10 per cent of basic information to identify fighters has been put in global systems. They called for more intelligence sharing between countries to track down foreign fighters.
According to data compiled by a leading US-based organization tracking the terrorist organization the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, as many as 2,500 Moroccan fighters are currently engaged in the Islamic State war zone.
The Saudi fighters account for nearly 3,000 fighters, besides over 2,755 Russian and nearly 1500 Jordanians.
Among the western countries, 700 fighters have come in from the United Kingdom, 500 from Germany, 400 from Belgium and 350 from the Netherlands.
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