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DoD: Thousands of Western passport holders in Syria fight

ASPEN, Colo.—The population of fighters in Syria who hold Western passports has grown to the thousands, a top Pentagon official said Thursday, fueling fears that extremists could relatively easily enter the U.S. to carry out an attack.

"The number of foreign fighters who are western passport holders, including Americans as a subset of that, numbers in the four digits. So, it’s a serious problem," Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike Vickers said during a discussion at the Aspen Security Forum.

Justice Department national security chief John Carlin said the volume of so-called foreign fighters is now of a magnitude well beyond that which the U.S. faced in other trouble spots.

"We are...seeing a spike in terms of the interest in joining violent jihad abroad in particular the attraction to be a foreign fighter in the Syria/northern Iraqi area," Carlin said. "The number of foreign fighters that are already in place in Syria and the number of westerners in that group is one that is unprecedented and I think is a larger number than we ever saw in the ungoverned space of the Pakistan and Afghanistan region."

Former Bush White House counterterrorism adviser Juan Zarate said the volume of Western passport holders fighting in Syria is particularly worrisome because they can ordinarily travel to the U.S. without visas.

"I think Syria's a disaster from a threat perspective. You do have thousands of foreign fighters flowing in and out, and it's very hard to track them," he said.

However, Zarate said the danger posed by the Syria situation isn't simply by supplying fighters but that the fight against the Syrian regime and now the Iraqi government is becoming a global rallying cry for jihadists.

"It's animating the movement itself. So there's an attractiveness to what's happening in Iraq and Syria that’s drawing adherents," he said.

Vickers said the terrorist threat out of Syria is one of the leading ones facing the U.S., particularly because of the sanctuary the chaos in that country is providing for Islamic extremists.

"Syria is probably the No. 1 threat, with Yemen, to the American homeland right now," the Pentagon official said.

Vickers declined, however, to say whether it would be in U.S. interests to give moderate opposition forces in Syria more sophisticated weaponry in order to try to end the fighting there.

"Strengthening the moderate opposition in Syria is a real imperative for us," the DOD official said. "Syria is a very difficult foreign policy problem, but it's one that's really in our interests to get a handle on."

A Los Angeles Times article published Saturday, quoting anonymous sources, put the number of Western passport holders fighting in Syria at up to 3,000 and growing rapidly.

UPDATE (Friday, 11:05 A.M.): This post has been updated to with comments from Carlin..