It is a tragedy that as the civil war in Syria begins its fourth year there are no signs of a solution on the horizon. The situation is dire. The human costs are staggering. Every month almost twice as many people are killed in the streets of Syria than were murdered in the Al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Centre on 9/11/2001. Refugees now amount to over four times the population of Brunei and a further group around the size of the population of Norway have had to flee their homes and are displaced. As the Telegraph uncovered only last week, Assad continues to use chemical weapons against civilians, including children.
Many radical jihadi groups – a number with links to Al Qaeda are using the conflict as a breeding ground for radicalisation and terrorism, radicalising young men (and some women) from countries far away from the conflict, including the UK. It is estimated that around 11,000 foreign fighters are now in Syria, fighting with these extreme jihadi groups. Many of these groups who claim to be fighting the Assad regime to assist the citizens of Syria are in fact fighting each other. Far from assisting the downfall of a bloody dictator, they provide propaganda opportunities for Assad to say it is he who is fighting a war against terrorist and foreign groups.
Both the Assad regime and the so called rebels continue to hinder the distribution of aid and humanitarian assistance. A UN Security Council Resolution, which was passed unanimously, last February has fallen on deaf ears. Despite this the UK has to date managed to distribute around £600million in aid to help those in need within Syria and to refugees on its borders.
The UK is also sending a more sinister and alarming cargo to Syria. Britain has become the leading provider of radicalised recruits to the extremist jihadi groups from the West. The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR), based at Kings College, London, has traced young British men from cities including Bradford, Birmingham, London, and Portsmouth and the town of Crawley, who are in Syria fighting with jihadi groups who have links to Al Qaeda including Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) and Jabhat al-Nusra. ICSR estimate that around 400 foreign fighters currently in Syria are British born, with around 2,800 in total from the West.
The international community’s failure to find solutions to end the conflict in Syria feeds the narratives of the so called disseminators – supporters of the jihadist groups – who use social media, and websites to radicalise their followers. People like Abdul Waheed Majid (Abu Suleiman Al Britani), a family man from Crawley, who drove a truck bomb into the gates of Aleppo prison in a suicide attack and Anil Khalil Raoufi, (Abu Layth) a student at the University of Liverpool who was recently killed in fighting between rebel groups. These two men had been radicalised through exposure to propaganda on social media. They themselves then using social media – Raoufi had 2000 followers on twitter – to encourage others to join them and to record the awful atrocities they inflict.
It is a tragedy for the families who have to suffer bereavement, over 20 men from Britain are believed to have been killed so far, and also the shame and humiliation as they face the anger of their community in the UK and for themselves having to come to terms with the revelation of their sons’ radicalisation. Recently the police launched a campaign, as part of the Prevent strategy, to get families – in particular – mothers to look for signs of radicalisation and to dissuade their sons’ and inform the police but it is often the families who are last to know of the radicalisation which their sons’ hide from them. It is the disseminators who keep just within the law that must be tackled it is they who encourage the actions of these brainwashed recruits.
Far from the conflict in Syria coming to an end, the terrorist threat from these radicalised recruits returning home, further radicalised and better trained, spreading their ideology, has the potential to be a huge threat to the security of the UK. We must urgently develop a response to this threat, the police have already arrested over 40 people this year for Syria related offences on their return to the UK that is twice as many as in the whole of 2013.
Even though the police and Crown Prosecution Service are rightly arresting and prosecuting terrorists who return from Syria, the maximum tariff for many will be only ten years. I welcome the guilty verdict on 20 May of Mashudur Choudhury, who is the first Briton to be convicted, I hope the judge when sentencing Choudhury on 13 June gives the maximum sentence available to send out a clear message that the Courts too will take a strong line. The terrorism law, under which they will be prosecuted, dates back to 2006, long before the conflict in Syria began. It is time to review this outdated law and introduce an automatic life tariff for these terrorists. We must also tackle the extremism at root cause and I urge the Government to urgently review the Prevent strategy and the Terrorism Act 2006 and open a debate on how we deal with this time-bomb.

Lord Noon KT MBE