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“Some never achieve their intent and simply return home. Thus their depth of experience varies widely, making some individuals much more concerning than others,” he said.

Investigating Canadian extremists once they are abroad was “inherently challenging,” he said. “The number of individuals overseas are in constant flux, their motivations are difficult to ascertain, their movement across sometimes isolated terrain are difficult to track.”

While officials had previously said that “dozens” of Canadians had left for Syria to fight, this was the first time a more specific figure had been disclosed. It follows similar admissions by the U.S. and U.K.

In the past six months alone, three Canadians have been killed while fighting with Al-Qaeda-linked factions in Syria, most recently Damian Clairmont, 22, a Muslim convert from Calgary who was reported dead last month.

Another convert from Timmins, Ont., André Poulin, appears to have died last summer, around the same time that Ali Dirie, a convicted Somali-born Canadian terrorist from Toronto, was killed.

Canada is hardly the only Western country whose citizens have taken up arms in Syria. A British think tank reported there are now up to 11,000 foreign fighters in the conflict from 74 countries, and that between nine and 100 may be Canadian. Because of the difficulties verifying its numbers, the group provided ranges rather than exact numbers.

The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation attributed the steep rise in foreign fighters to the increasing sectarian nature of the conflict, which has pitted Sunni armed opposition groups against pro-government Shiite fighters from Hezbollah, Iran and Iraq.