The foreign minister has suggested that instead of the international community discussing taking back foreign fighters who joined the Islamic State militant group, there should talk about punishing them.
During his address at a debate of the United Nations Security Council in New York, Péter Szijjártó said the defeat of the Islamic State brings with it new security challenges for the world. He added that these challenges were rooted in the fact that tens of thousands of foreign fighters had joined IS in recent years. “More than 5,000 of them are European Union citizens,” the minister added.
The minister told MTI that he’s shocked to see these foreign fighters accepted back into European societies. He said these fighters “should be punished and imprisoned in the place where they committed their crimes.”
Minister Szijjártó argued that the Islamic State’s foreign fighters had chosen to join a terrorist group and were responsible for murders and spreading extremist ideologies. “We shouldn’t be talking about accepting these people back,” he insisted.
The minister added that IS was now attempting to infiltrate its militants into Europe “which is a very serious security threat to us”. In order to prevent this, Europe must bolster the protection of its external borders, he concluded.
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