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Called to Fight
Mukhtar M. Ibrahim

Congressional report: Minnesota top U.S. spot for ISIS recruiting

ISIS fighters parade in Iraq
American officials are losing the battle to stem the flow of ISIS recruits from Minnesota and other states to the Middle East, according to a new report. Here, ISIS fighters paraded down a main road in a northern Iraqi city.
AP 2014

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Minnesota leads the nation in the number of citizens seeking to fight alongside ISIS.

More than 250 Americans across the nation have joined or attempted to join ISIS, according to a bipartisan report released Tuesday by members of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee.

Of those recruits, lawmakers reviewed the cases of 58 individuals that were already public. Minnesotans represented 26 percent — one in four — of those cases.

The U.S. is losing the battle to stem the flow of ISIS recruits to the Middle East because the government "lacks a comprehensive strategy for combating terrorist and foreign fighter travel," the report concludes. "Of the hundreds of Americans who have sought to travel to the conflict zone in Syria and Iraq, authorities have only interdicted a fraction of them. Several dozen have also managed to make it back into America."

Airstrikes against ISIS have not dissuaded Americans to enlist with ISIS, and individuals who previously aspired to go to Afghanistan or Somalia are now going to Syria instead, the report said.

Since 2011, more than 25,000 foreign fighters have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight with ISIS, majority of them coming from the Middle East and North Africa, intelligence officials estimated according to the report.