"In September 2014 less than 900 foreign terrorist fighters had been identified by Interpol. Today, in less than a year, more than 4,000 profiles are available in our database," he said.
| All those jihadis posting the standard smile-holding-kaffir-head photos on Facebook makes it ever so much easier than it used to be, donchaknow. |
Stock said nations needed to boost their information sharing and improve access to the data they have for organizations like Interpol if they wanted to curb the flow of foreigners to jihadist groups.
"We must remember that while information is increasingly being shared across borders, it is much slower than it takes for foreign holy warriors to recruit and travel to and from conflict zones," he said.
"A gap still exists between the number of foreign terrorist fighters we have identified and those estimated to have reached conflict zones. We need to work to close this gap," he added.
A recent U.N. report showed an increase in the number of imported muscle from last year, with more than 25,000 foreign jihadists from more than 100 countries now involved in armed conflicts.
A large number of fighters were traveling from Tunisia, Morocco, La Belle France and Russia, but the report cited new flows of jihadists from the Maldives, Finland, Trinidad and Tobago, as well as from some countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.