News Americas, WASHINGTON, D.C., Mar. 20, 2015: About 100 recruits have traveled from the Caribbean to Syria to fight alongside Islamic extremists.
That’s according to Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly, the commander of the U.S. Southern Command, who called the movement concerning.
During a testimony on Southcom’s posture before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the general said the 100 Caribbean natives have traveled into Syria to join ISIS and they get good at killing and pick up some real job skills in terms of explosives and beheadings.
“Everyone is concerned, of course, if they come home. If they went over radicalized, one would expect they will come back at least that radicalized but…with really good job skills that they picked up in the fight,” he added.
Kelly also noted that there are a couple of pretty radical mosques in the region: and while 100 [recruits] certainly doesn’t seem like a lot, the little countries that they come from have a total inability to really deal with it.
“That’s kind of what their concern is, so we watch them,” he added, specifying Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Suriname and Venezuela as vulnerable nations.
One method of dealing with this issue, Kelly said, is sharing information or intelligence with certain countries.
“We share a great deal of either intelligence or information,” he said. “We’ve worked out some ways, as an example, to share information with some of these countries that then interdict drug movements.”
