Some 6,000 al Qaeda in Syria, including 600 from the West

Terrorism experts confirmed Israel’s military intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, who warned on July 24 that Syria was today the leading jihadist battlefield in the world. Of the estimated 6,000 fighters entering Syria through Turkey, 600 come from Europe, North America and Australia and may return to the West. “The scale of this is completely different from what we've experienced in the past," Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union's counterterrorism coordinator, said at the conference in Aspen.
Gen. Kochavi warned that that the thousands of al Qaeda pouring into Syria from around the world are fighting to create an Islamic state there, just as they are in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. This peril, he said, is closing in on Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.